Related papers: Extremely quick thermalization in a macroscopic qu…
Time-asymmetric behavior as embodied in the second law of thermodynamics is observed in {\it individual macroscopic} systems. It can be understood as arising naturally from time-symmetric microscopic laws when account is taken of a) the…
Prethermalization refers to the transient phenomenon where a system thermalizes according to a Hamiltonian that is not the generator of its evolution. We provide here a rigorous framework for quantum spin systems where prethermalization is…
We study the thermalization dynamics of a quantum system embedded in an incommensurate potential and coupled to a Markovian thermal reservoir. The dephasing induced by the bath drives the system toward an infinite-temperature steady state,…
Considering any Hamiltonian, any initial state, and measurements with a small number of possible outcomes compared to the dimension, we show that most measurements are already equilibrated. To investigate non-trivial equilibration we…
New exact results about the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of open quantum systems at arbitrary timescales are obtained by considering all possible variations of initial conditions of a system, its environment, and correlations between them.…
The dynamics of quantum entanglement plays a central role in explaining the emergence of thermal equilibrium in isolated many-body systems. However, entanglement is notoriously hard to measure. Recent works have introduced a notion of…
One explanation of the thermalization of an isolated quantum system is the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which posits that all energy eigenstates are thermal. Based on this idea, we use dynamical typicality to predict the thermal…
Thermal states are the bedrock of statistical physics. Nevertheless, when and how they actually arise in closed quantum systems is not fully understood. We consider this question for systems with local Hamiltonians on finite quantum…
Many physical processes we observe in nature involve variations of macroscopic quantities over spatial and temporal scales much larger than microscopic molecular collision scales and can be considered as in local thermal equilibrium. In…
It was recently observed that in certain thermalizing many-body systems, measuring the complement of a subsystem that thermalized to infinite temperature in a suitable orthonormal basis gives rise to approximate quantum state k-designs as…
We study first order phase transitions that occur when the temperature of the system increases and we identify the conditions that lead to super-heating, a phase where the system can heat up arbitrarily. First order phase transitions with…
A general formulation of stochastic thermodynamics is presented for open systems exchanging energy and particles with multiple reservoirs. By introducing a partition in terms of "macrostates" (e.g. sets of "microstates"), the consequence on…
We present numerical results demonstrating the possibility of thermalization of single-particle observables in a one-dimensional integrable system (a quasicondensate of ultra-cold, weakly-interacting bosonic atoms being studied as a…
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…
The issue of the thermalization of an isolated quantum system is addressed by considering a perfect gas confined by gravity and initially trapped above a certain height. As we are interested in the behavior of truly isolated systems, we…
It has been built a strict mathematical model of the thermodynamic equilibrium's establishment in the originally nonequilibrium cosmological ultrarelativistic plasma for the arbitrary accelerated Universe under the assumption that scaling…
We present a unifying framework to the understanding of when and how quantum mechanical systems become independent of their initial conditions and adapt macroscopic properties (like temperature) of the environment.By viewing this problem…
One of the fundamental problems of quantum statistical physics is how an ideally isolated quantum system can ever reach thermal equilibrium behavior despite the unitary time evolution of quantum-mechanical systems. Here, we study, via…
We study the relaxation of a quantum system towards the thermal equilibrium using tools developed within the context of quantum information theory. We consider a model in which the system is a qubit, and reaches equilibrium after several…
Simulating the nonequilibrium dynamics of thermal states is a fundamental problem across scales from high energy to condensed matter physics. Quantum computers may provide a way to solve this problem efficiently. Preparing a thermal state…