Related papers: Quantum Heat Baths satisfying the eigenstate therm…
A possible definition of the specific heat of open quantum systems is based on the reduced partition function of the system. For a free damped quantum particle, it has been found that under certain conditions, this specific heat can become…
The approach to thermal equilibrium, or thermalization, in isolated quantum systems is among the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. Recent theoretical studies have revealed that thermalization in isolated quantum systems has…
It is possible to extract work from a quantum-mechanical system whose dynamics is governed by a time-dependent cyclic Hamiltonian. An energy bath is required to operate such a quantum engine in place of the heat bath used to run a…
Small systems (of interest in the areas of nanophysics, quantum information, etc.) are particularly vulnerable to environmental effects. Thus, we determine various thermodynamic functions for an oscillator in an arbitrary heat bath at…
We address a particular instance where open quantum systems may be used as quantum probes for an emergent property of a complex system, as the temperature of a thermal bath. The inherent fragility of the quantum probes against decoherence…
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…
Eigenstate thermalization refers to the property that an energy eigenstate of a many-body system is indistinguishable from a thermal equilibrium ensemble at the same energy as far as expectation values of local observables are concerned. In…
We propose a generalization of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis accounting for the emergence of symmetry-breaking phases. It consists of two conditions that any system with a degenerate spectrum must fulfill in order to thermalize.…
We consider the effect of a thermal bath on quantum correlations induced by the gravitational interaction in the weak field limit between two massive cat states, called gravitational cat (gravcat) states. The main goal of this paper is to…
Absence of thermalization after a global quantum quench is a well-established numerical observation in integrable many-body systems, and can be empirically related to a violation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in such…
Even though foundations of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) are based on random matrix theory, physical Hamiltonians and observables substantially differ from random operators. One of the major challenges is to embed local…
The free energy of a quantum oscillator in an arbitrary heat bath at a temperature T is given by a "remarkable formula" which involves only a single integral. This leads to a corresponding simple result for the entropy. The low temperature…
We analyze the thermalization properties and the validity of the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis in a generic class of quantum Hamiltonians where the quench parameter explicitly breaks a Z_2 symmetry. Natural realizations of such…
The principle of microscopic reversibility lies at the core of fluctuation theorems, which have extended our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics to the statistical level. In the quantum regime, however, this elementary…
We consider to what extent quantum walks can constitute models of thermalization, analogously to how classical random walks can be models for classical thermalization. In a quantum walk over a graph, a walker moves in a superposition of…
Coherent control of self-contained quantum systems offers the possibility to fabricate smallest thermal transistors. The steady coherence created by the delocalization of electronic excited states arouses nonlinear heat transports in…
Small quantum systems non-weakly coupled to a bath become in the quantum regime surrounded by a cloud of photons or phonons, which modifies their thermodynamic behavior. Exactly solvable examples are the Brownian motion of a quantum…
A system put in contact with a large heat bath normally thermalizes. This means that the state of the system approaches an equilibrium state, the latter depending only on macroscopic characteristics of the bath (e.g. temperature), but not…
We investigate the evolution of a target qubit caused by its multiple random collisions with $N$-qubit clusters. Depending on the cluster state, the evolution of the target qubit may correspond to its effective interaction with a thermal…
We simulate dynamics of many-particle systems of bosons and fermions using discrete time quantum walks on lattices. We present a computational proof of a behavior of the simulated systems similar to the one observed in Hamiltonian dynamics…