Related papers: Quantum mechanical evolution towards thermal equil…
An exact stochastic model for the thermalisation of quantum states is proposed. The model has various physically appealing properties. The dynamics are characterised by an underlying Schrodinger evolution, together with a nonlinear term…
The influence of the environment in the thermal equilibrium properties of a bipartite continuous variable quantum system is studied. The problem is treated within a system-plus-reservoir approach. The considered model reproduces the…
This colloquium gives an overview of recent theoretical and experimental progress in the area of nonequilibrium dynamics of isolated quantum systems. We particularly focus on quantum quenches: the temporal evolution following a sudden or…
The Brownian motion of a quantum particle in a harmonic confining potential and coupled to a harmonic quantum thermal bath is exactly solvable. It is shown that at low enough temperatures the stationary state is non-Gibbsian due to an…
Temperature uncertainty of a quantum system in canonical ensemble is inversely determined by its energy fluctuation, which is known as the temperature-energy uncertainty relation. No such uncertainty relation was discovered for a…
Experiments with trapped atomic gases have opened novel possibilities for studying the evolution of nonequilibrium finite quantum systems, which revived the necessity of reconsidering and developing the theory of such processes. This review…
Equilibrium is a rather ideal situation, the exception rather than the rule in Nature. Whenever the external or internal parameters of a physical system are varied its subsequent relaxation to equilibrium may be either impossible or take…
Simulations are performed of a small quantum system interacting with a quantum environment. The system consists of various initial states of two harmonic oscillators coupled to give normal modes. The environment is "designed" by its level…
The investigation of thermalization in isolated quantum many-body systems has a long history, dating back to the time of developing statistical mechanics. Most quantum many-body systems in nature are considered to thermalize, while some…
The emergence of statistical mechanics from quantum dynamics is a central problem in quantum many-body physics. Deriving observables aligned with the prediction of the canonical ensemble for a quantum system relies on the presence of a bath…
This work presents a general unifying theoretical framework for quantum non-equilibrium systems. It is based on a re-statement of the dynamical problem as one of inferring the distribution of collision events that move a system toward…
Thermodynamics plays an important role both in the foundations of physics and in technological applications. An operational perspective adopted in recent years is to formulate it as a quantum resource theory. At the core of this theory is…
The thermodynamic implications for the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of quantum systems are to date largely unexplored, especially for quantum many-body systems. In this paper we investigate the paradigmatic case of an array of…
The result that closed systems evolve toward equilibrium is derived entirely on the basis of quantum field theory for a model system, without invoking any of the common extra-mathematical notions of particle trajectories, collapse of the…
A system put in contact with a large heat bath normally thermalizes. This means that the state of the system approaches an equilibrium state, the latter depending only on macroscopic characteristics of the bath (e.g. temperature), but not…
Understanding the rich spatial and temporal structures in nonequilibrium thermal environments is a major subject of statistical mechanics. Because universal laws, based on an ensemble of systems, are mute on an individual system, exploring…
We discuss the application of techniques of quantum estimation theory and quantum metrology to thermometry. The ultimate limit to the precision at which the temperature of a system at thermal equilibrium can be determined is related to the…
We derive a thermodynamic uncertainty relation for general open quantum dynamics, described by a joint unitary evolution on a composite system comprising a system and an environment. By measuring the environmental state after the…
Gibbs and Boltzmann definitions of temperature agree only in the macroscopic limit. The ambiguity in identifying the equilibrium temperature of a finite sized `small' system exchanging energy with a bath is usually understood as a…
In quantum statistical mechanics, equilibrium states have been shown to be the typical states for a system that is entangled with its environment, suggesting a possible identification between thermodynamic and von Neumann entropies. In this…