Related papers: Extremely quick thermalization in a macroscopic qu…
A simple procedure for obtaining superpositions of macroscopically distinct states is proposed and analyzed. We find that a thermal equilibrium state can be converted into such a state when a single global measurement of a macroscopic…
A principle on the macroscopic motion of systems in thermodynamic equilibrium, rarely discussed in texts, is reviewed: Very small but still macroscopic parts of a fully isolated system in thermal equilibrium move as if points of a rigid…
We consider conditions under which an isolated quantum system approaches a microcanonical equilibrium state. A key component is the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis, which proposes that all energy eigenstates appear thermal. We…
The question of how systems respond to perturbations is ubiquitous in physics. Predicting this response for large classes of systems becomes particularly challenging if many degrees of freedom are involved and linear response theory cannot…
We study the internal dynamics of an elementary quantum system placed close to a body held at a temperature different from that of the surrounding radiation. We derive general expressions for lifetime and density matrix valid for bodies of…
We study the decoherence and thermalization dynamics of a nanoscale system coupled nonperturbatively to a fully quantum-mechanical bath. The system is prepared out of equilibrium in a pure state of the complete system. We propose a random…
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 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…
Thermalization in highly excited quantum many-body system does not necessarily mean a complete memory loss of the way the system was formed. This effect may pave a way for a quantum computing, with a large number of qubits $n\simeq…
We develop a rigorous system-agnostic method to predict quantum thermalization in an overwhelming fraction of accessible pure states in a many-body system, entirely in terms of certain out-of-time-ordered correlators of few-body…
Under the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH), quantum-quenched systems equilibrate towards canonical, thermal ensembles. While at first glance the ETH might seem a very strong hypothesis, we show that it is indeed not only…
This chapter discusses the conditions and timescales under which isolated many-body quantum systems, initially far from equilibrium, ultimately reach thermal equilibrium. We also examine quantities that, during the relaxation process,…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy production in macroscopic systems is non-negative, reaching zero only at thermodynamic equilibrium. As a corollary, this implies that the state trajectory of macroscopic systems is…
Nonequilibrium dynamics of a nonintegrable system without the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is studied. It is shown that, in the thermodynamic limit, this model thermalizes after an arbitrary quantum quench at finite temperature,…
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…
This thesis is devoted to the theoretical study of slow thermodynamic processes in non-equilibrium stochastic systems. Its main result is a physically and mathematically consistent construction of relevant thermodynamic quantities in the…
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.…
After a sudden disruption, weakly interacting quantum systems first relax to a prethermalized state that can be described by perturbation theory and a generalized Gibbs ensemble. Using these properties of the prethermalized state we…
This review is devoted to the problem of thermalization in a small isolated conglomerate of interacting constituents. A variety of physically important systems of intensive current interest belong to this category: complex atoms, molecules…
Isolated quantum systems typically approach thermal equilibrium as described by the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH). Going beyond this involves either higher order correlators (full thermalization) or the formation of state…