Related papers: Quantum mechanical evolution towards thermal equil…

Describing open quantum systems far from equilibrium is challenging, in particular when the environment is mesoscopic, when it develops nonequilibrium features during the evolution, or when the memory effects cannot be disregarded. Here, we…

Based on the view that thermal equilibrium should be characterized through macroscopic observations, we develop a general theory about typicality of thermal equilibrium and the approach to thermal equilibrium in macroscopic quantum systems.…

Lack of knowledge about the detailed many-particle motion on the microscopic scale is a key issue in any theoretical description of a macroscopic experiment. For systems at or close to thermal equilibrium, statistical mechanics provides a…

Thermodynamical equilibrium is considered as an effect of quantum entangling of the vacuum state of a system. An explicit mathematical model of multi- particle entangled pure quantum states is developed and analyzed. In the framework, the…

Why is thermalisation a universal phenomenon? How does a quantum system reach thermodynamical equilibrium? These questions are not new, dating even from the very birth of quantum theory and have been the subject of a renewed interest over…

The thermodynamics of quantum systems driven out of equilibrium has attracted increasing attention in last the decade, in connection with quantum information and statistical physics, and with a focus on non-classical signatures. While a…

We study the speed of fluctuation of a quantum system around its thermodynamic equilibrium state, and show that the speed will be extremely small for almost all times in typical thermodynamic cases. The setting considered here is that of a…

Quantum thermalization describes how closed quantum systems can effectively reach thermal equilibrium, resolving the apparent incongruity between the reversibility of Schr\"odinger's equation and the second law of thermodynamics. Despite…

Classical thermodynamics is built with the concept of equilibrium states. However, it is less clear how equilibrium thermodynamics emerges through the dynamics that follows the principle of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we develop a…

Two identical finite quantum systems prepared initially at different temperatures, isolated from the environment, and subsequently brought into contact are demonstrated to relax towards Gibbs-like quasi-equilibrium states with a common…

Equilibrium properties of many-body systems with a large number of degrees of freedom are generally expected to be described by statistical mechanics. Such expectations are closely tied to the observation of thermalization, as manifested…

A large class of isolated quantum system in a pure state can equilibrate and serve as a heat bath. We show that once the equilibrium is reached, any of its subsystems that is much smaller than the isolated system is thermalized such that…

The thermal or equilibrium ensemble is one of the most ubiquitous states of matter. For models comprised of many locally interacting quantum particles, it describes a wide range of physical situations, relevant to condensed matter physics,…

Focusing on isolated macroscopic systems, described either in terms of a quantum mechanical or a classical model, our two key questions are: In how far does an initial ensemble (usually far from equilibrium and largely unknown in detail)…

A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…

We investigate the equilibration and thermalization properties of quantum systems interacting with a finite dimensional environment. By exploiting the concept of time averaged states, we introduce a completely positive map which allows to…

We consider the notion of thermal equilibrium for an individual closed macroscopic quantum system in a pure state, i.e., described by a wave function. The macroscopic properties in thermal equilibrium of such a system, determined by its…

During recent years the interest to dynamics of quantum systems has grown considerably. Quantum many body systems out of equilibrium often manifest behavior, different from the one predicted by standard statistical mechanics and…

Classical thermodynamics is unrivalled in its range of applications and relevance to everyday life. It enables a description of complex systems, made up of microscopic particles, in terms of a small number of macroscopic quantities, such as…

For a quantum system to be captured by a stationary statistical ensemble, as is common in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, it is necessary that it reaches some apparently stationary state in the first place. In this book chapter,…