Related papers: Relative Thermalization
The approach to thermal equilibrium, or thermalization, in isolated quantum systems is among the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. Recent theoretical studies have revealed that thermalization in isolated quantum systems has…
Ability of dynamical systems to relax to equilibrium has been investigated since the invention of statistical mechanics, which establishes the connection between dynamics of many-body Hamiltonian systems and phenomenological thermodynamics.…
Quantum thermalization occurs in a broad class of systems from elementary particles to complex materials. Out-of-equilibrium quantum systems have long been understood to either thermalize or retain memory of their initial states, but not…
A quantum system and a thermal bath can reach thermal equilibrium through an interaction, whereupon the system acquires the same temperature as the bath. But how does a delocalised quantum system thermalise with a bath whose local…
Non-Markovian corrections to the Markovian quantum master equation of an open quantum system are investigated up to the second order of the interaction between the system of interest and a thermal reservoir. The concept of "natural…
Deriving conditions under which a macroscopic system thermalizes directly from the underlying quantum many-body dynamics of its microscopic constituents is a long-standing challenge in theoretical physics. The well-known eigenstate…
Significant attention has been devoted to the problem of thermalization of observables in isolated quantum setups by individual eigenstates. Here, we address this issue from an open quantum system perspective, examining an isolated setup…
Common intuition tells us that if one part of a connected system is cooled continuously, the other parts should also cool down. This intuition can be given a microscopic foundation for the case of a generic quantum system coupled to a…
We show, without relying on any unproven assumptions, that a low-density free fermion chain exhibits thermalization in the following (restricted) sense. We choose the initial state as a pure state drawn randomly from the Hilbert space in…
In this work we investigate the late-time stationary states of open quantum systems coupled to a thermal reservoir in the strong coupling regime. In general such systems do not necessarily relax to a Boltzmann distribution if the coupling…
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…
In an isolated quantum many-body system undergoing unitary evolution, we study the thermalization of a subsystem, treating the rest of the system as a bath. In this setting, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) was proposed to…
We consider the common spin-1/2 XX-model in one dimension with open boundary conditions and a large but finite number of spins. The system is in thermal equilibrium at times t<0, and is subject to a weak local perturbation (quantum quench)…
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…
Prethermalization refers to the physical phenomenon where a system evolves toward some long-lived non-equilibrium steady state before eventual thermalization sets in. One general scenario where this occurs is in driven systems with dynamics…
We discuss the thermalization process in the kinetic approximation in the presence of non--zero initial anomalous quantum expectation values on top of an initial non--planckian (non--thermal) level population. Namely we derive a system of…
The fact that macroscopic systems approach thermal equilibrium may seem puzzling, for example, because it may seem to conflict with the time-reversibility of the microscopic dynamics. We here prove that in a macroscopic quantum system for a…
We study the heat statistics of a multi-level $N$-dimensional quantum system monitored by a sequence of projective measurements. The late-time, asymptotic properties of the heat characteristic function are analyzed in the thermodynamic…
The last decade has witnessed the remarkable progress in our understanding of thermalization in isolated quantum systems. Combining the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis with quantum measurement theory, we extend the framework of quantum…
The heat flow between a quantum system and its reservoir is analyzed when initially both are in a separable thermal state and asymptotically approach a correlated equilibrium. General findings are illustrated for specific systems and…