Related papers: The approach to equilibrium in a macroscopic quant…
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,…
Optimal (reversible) processes in thermodynamics can be modelled as step-by-step processes, where the system is successively thermalized with respect to different Hamiltonians by an external thermal bath. However, in practice interactions…
The linear scalar quantum field, propagating in a globally hyperbolic spacetime, is a relatively simple physical model that allows us to study many aspects in explicit detail. In this review we focus on the theory of thermal equilibrium…
We propose a scheme for a quantum thermal machine made by atoms interacting with a single non-equilibrium electromagnetic field. The field is produced by a simple configuration of macroscopic objects held at thermal equilibrium at different…
Understanding the evolution towards thermal equilibrium of an isolated quantum system is at the foundation of statistical mechanics and a subject of interest in such diverse areas as cold atom physics or the quantum mechanics of black…
The project concerns the interplay among quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, in isolated quantum systems. The underlying goal is to improve our understanding of the concept of thermal equilibrium in quantum systems.…
Active matter generates order or patterns through nonequilibrium dynamics. An open research challenge is to determine how efficiently a nonequilibrium self-organising system can convert consumed energy into macroscopic order. We study an…
We study the approach to equilibrium of bottomonium in the quark-gluon plasma within the open quantum system framework. We perform large-scale simulations of the long-time behavior in three dimensions using the quantum trajectory method to…
Many experimentally relevant systems are quasi-one-dimensional, consisting of nearly decoupled chains. In these systems, there is a natural separation of scales between the strong intra-chain interactions and the weak interchain coupling.…
Quantum systems typically reach thermal equilibrium rather quickly when coupled to a thermal environment. The usual way of bounding the speed of this process is by estimating the spectral gap of the dissipative generator. However the gap,…
We analyse the nature of the statistics of the work done on or by a quantum many-body system brought out of equilibrium. We show that, for the sudden quench and for an initial state which commutes with the initial Hamiltonian, it is…
Transitions between nonequilibrium steady states obey a generalized Clausius inequality, which becomes an equality in the quasistatic limit. For slow but finite transitions, we show that the behavior of the system is described by a response…
We show that the physical mechanism for the equilibration of closed quantum systems is dephasing, and identify the energy scales that determine the equilibration timescale of a given observable. For realistic physical systems (e.g those…
We report model calculations of the time-dependent internal energy and entropy for a single quasi-free massive quantum particle at a constant temperature. We show that the whole process started from a fully coherent quantum state to…
The assumption that quantum systems relax to a stationary state in the long-time limit underpins statistical physics and much of our intuitive understanding of scientific phenomena. For isolated systems this follows from the eigenstate…
Long-range interacting Hamiltonian systems are believed to relax generically towards non-equilibrium states called "quasi-stationary" because they evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium very slowly, on a time-scale diverging with particle…
We analyse the evolution of a quantum oscillator in a finite temperature environment using the quantum state diffusion (QSD) picture. Following a treatment similar to that of reference [7] we identify stationary solutions of the…
Motivated by dynamical experiments on cold atomic gases, we develop a quantum kinetic approach to weakly perturbed integrable models out of equilibrium. Using the exact matrix elements of the underlying integrable model we establish an…
We study the equilibration behaviour of a quantum particle in a one-dimensional box, with respect to a coarse grained position measurement (whether it lies in a certain spatial window or not). We show that equilibration in this context…
We analyze the thermodynamics of spherically symmetric thin-shell solutions to Einstein's equations, including solutions with negative interior mass. We show the inclusion of such solutions is essential for the thermodynamic consistency of…