Related papers: The approach to equilibrium in a macroscopic quant…
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…
Small thermodynamic systems exhibit peculiar behavior different from that observed in long-scale systems. Non-equilibrium processes taking place in those systems are strongly influenced by the presence of fluctuations which can be large.…
A bipartite system whose subsystems are fully quantum chaotic and coupled by a perturbative interaction with a tunable strength is a paradigmatic model for investigating how isolated quantum systems relax towards an equilibrium. It is found…
We investigate how relativistic, nonabelian plasmas approach equilibrium in a general context. Our treatment is entirely parametric and for small Yang-Mills coupling $\alpha$. First we study isotropic systems with an initially…
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…
Chaos and ergodicity are the cornerstones of statistical physics and thermodynamics. While classically even small systems like a particle in a two-dimensional cavity, can exhibit chaotic behavior and thereby relax to a microcanonical…
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…
Thermalization is the process through which a physical system evolves toward a state of thermal equilibrium. Determining whether or not a physical system will thermalize from an initial state has been a key question in condensed matter…
We consider a realistic nonequilibrium protocol, where a quantum system in thermal equilibrium is suddenly subjected to an external force. Due to this force, the system is driven out of equilibrium and the expectation values of certain…
It has recently been shown that small quantum subsystems generically equilibrate, in the sense that they spend most of the time close to a fixed equilibrium state. This relies on just two assumptions: that the state is spread over many…
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…
Rigorous derivations of the approach of individual elements of large isolated systems to a state of thermal equilibrium, starting from arbitrary initial states, are exceedingly rare. This is particularly true for quantum mechanical systems.…
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…
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…
We study the speed of fluctuation of a quantum system around its thermodynamic equilibrium state, and show that the speed will be extremely small for almost all times in typical thermodynamic cases. The setting considered here is that of a…
We discuss how the thermalization of an elementary quantum system is modified when the system is placed in an environment out of thermal equilibrium. To this aim we provide a detailed investigation of the dynamics of an atomic system placed…
We consider isolated many-body quantum systems which do not thermalize, i.e., expectation values approach an (approximately) steady longtime limit which disagrees with the microcanonical prediction of equilibrium statistical mechanics. A…
We investigate the thermalization of a stochastic system with discrete phase space, initially at equilibrium at temperature $T_i$ and then termalizing in an environment at temperature $T_f$ , considering both cases $T_i > T_f$ and $T_i <…
A key feature of non-equilibrium thermodynamics is the Markovian, deterministic relaxation of coarse observables such as, for example, the temperature difference between two macroscopic objects which evolves independently of almost all…
Self-gravitating systems are expected to reach a statistical equilibrium state either through collisional relaxation or violent collisionless relaxation. However, a maximum entropy state does not always exist and the system may undergo a…