Related papers: Typical fast thermalization processes in closed ma…
Gibbs and Boltzmann definitions of temperature agree only in the macroscopic limit. The ambiguity in identifying the equilibrium temperature of a finite sized `small' system exchanging energy with a bath is usually understood as a…
A fundamental challenge is to understand nonequilibrium statistical mechanics starting from microscopic chaos in the equations of motion of a many-particle system. In this review we summarize recent theoretical advances along these lines.…
In the presence of sufficiently strong disorder or quasiperiodic fields, an interacting many-body system can fail to thermalize and become many-body localized. The associated transition is of particular interest, since it occurs not only in…
Dynamics of large complex systems, such as relaxation towards equilibrium in classical statistical mechanics, often obeys a master equation. The equation significantly simplifies the complexities but describes essential information of…
Quantum thermodynamics is an emerging research field aiming to extend standard thermodynamics and non-equilibrium statistical physics to ensembles of sizes well below the thermodynamic limit, in non-equilibrium situations, and with the full…
Nonequilibrium states of closed quantum many-body systems defy a thermodynamic description. As a consequence, constraints such as the principle of equal a priori probabilities in the microcanonical ensemble can be relaxed, which can lead to…
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…
Typicality of the orthogonal dynamics (TOD) is established as a generic feature of temporal relaxation processes in isolated many-body quantum systems. The basic idea in the simplest case is that the transient non-equilibrium behavior is…
Quantum thermalization describes how closed quantum systems can effectively reach thermal equilibrium, resolving the apparent incongruity between the reversibility of Schr\"odinger's equation and the second law of thermodynamics. Despite…
The statistical mechanical description of small systems staying in thermal equilibrium with an environment can be achieved by means of the Hamiltonian of mean force. In contrast to the reduced density matrix of an open quantum system, or…
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…
Understanding the realization of thermal equilibrium through the thermalization process in a many-body system is a fundamental and complex scientific question, bridging thermodynamics and classical dynamics and connecting to a host of…
A large class of isolated quantum system in a pure state can equilibrate and serve as a heat bath. We show that once the equilibrium is reached, any of its subsystems that is much smaller than the isolated system is thermalized such that…
If a many-body quantum system approaches thermal equilibrium from a generic initial state, then the expectation value $\langle\psi(t)|A_i|\psi(t)\rangle$, where $|\psi(t)\rangle$ is the system's state vector and $A_i$ is an experimentally…
Heat can flow from cold to hot at any phase separation. Therefore Lynden-Bell's gravo-thermal catastrophe must be reconsidered. The original objects of Thermodynamics, the separation of phases at first order phase transitions, like boiling…
We study the problem of the approach to equilibrium in a macroscopic quantum system in an abstract setting. We prove that, for a typical choice of "nonequilibrium subspace", any initial state (from the energy shell) thermalizes, and in fact…
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.…
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…
A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…
The investigation of nonequilibrium thermodynamics in quantum many-body systems underscores the importance of quantum work, which differs from its classical counterpart due to its statistical nature. Recent studies have shown that quantum…