Related papers: Extremely quick thermalization in a macroscopic qu…
The long-time dynamics of quantum systems, typically, but not always, results in a thermal steady state. The microscopic processes that lead to or circumvent this fate are of interest, since everyday experience tells us that not all spatial…
Macroscopic quantum superpositions are widely believed to be unobservable because large systems cannot be perfectly isolated from their environments. Here, we show that even under perfect isolation, intrinsic unitary dynamics with the…
Non-equilibrium time evolution in isolated many-body quantum systems generally results in thermalization. However, the relaxation process can be very slow, and quasi-stationary non-thermal plateaux are often observed at intermediate times.…
Thermalization of isolated quantum systems has been studied intensively in recent years and significant progresses have been achieved. Here, we study thermalization of small quantum systems that interact with large chaotic environments…
It has previously been suggested that small subsystems of closed quantum systems thermalize under some assumptions; however, this has been rigorously shown so far only for systems with very weak interaction between subsystems. In this work,…
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…
Prethermalization has been extensively studied in systems close to integrability. We propose a more general, yet conceptually simpler, setup for this phenomenon. We consider a---possibly nonintegrable---reference dynamics, weakly perturbed…
Thermalization is the dynamical process by which a many-body system evolves toward a thermal equilibrium state that maximizes its entropy. In certain cases, however, the establishment of thermal equilibrium is significantly slowed down and…
Macroscopic thermodynamics of equilibrium is constructed for systems obeying power-law canonical distributions. With this, the connection between macroscopic thermodynamics and microscopic statistical thermodynamics is generalized. This is…
The 2nd law of thermodynamics yields an irreversible increase in entropy until thermal equilibrium is achieved. This irreversible increase is often assumed to require large and complex systems to emerge from the reversible microscopic laws…
We study thermalization in many-body quantum systems locally coupled to an external bath. It is shown that quantum chaotic systems do thermalize, that is, they exhibit relaxation to an invariant ergodic state which, in the bulk, is well…
We provide an overview of our numerical and analytical studies of isolated interacting quantum systems that are quenched out of equilibrium instantaneously. We describe the relaxation process to a new equilibrium and obtain lower bounds for…
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…
Open quantum systems that comply with the master equation and detailed balance decay in a non-oscillatory manner to thermal equilibrium. Beyond the weak coupling limit, systems that break microreversibility (e.g., in the presence of…
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…
The recent discovery that for large Hilbert spaces, almost all (that is, typical) Hamiltonians have eigenstates that place small subsystems in thermal equilibrium, has shed much light on the origins of irreversibility and thermalization.…
Current quantum simulation experiments are starting to explore non-equilibrium many-body dynamics in previously inaccessible regimes in terms of system sizes and time scales. Therefore, the question emerges which observables are best suited…
Irreversibility, despite being a necessary condition for thermalization, still lacks a sound understanding in the context of isolated quantum many-body systems. In this work we approach this question by studying the behavior of generic…
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) explains why chaotic quantum many-body systems thermalize internally if the Hamiltonian lacks symmetries. If the Hamiltonian conserves one quantity ("charge"), the ETH implies thermalization…
There are both practical and foundational motivations to consider the thermodynamics of quantum systems at small scales. Here we address the issue of autonomous quantum thermal machines that are tailored to achieve some specific…