Related papers: Thermalization and Return to Equilibrium on Finite…
The fact that macroscopic systems approach thermal equilibrium may seem puzzling, for example, because it may seem to conflict with the time-reversibility of the microscopic dynamics. We here prove that in a macroscopic quantum system for a…
By numerically exact calculations of spin-1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg models on small clusters, we demonstrate that quantum entanglement between subsystems $A$ and $B$ in a pure ground state of a whole system $A+B$ can induce thermal…
On a quantum superconducting processor we observe partial and infinite-temperature thermalization induced by a sequence of repeated quantum projective measurements, interspersed by a unitary (Hamiltonian) evolution. Specifically, on a qubit…
The quantum thermodynamic behavior of small systems is investigated in presence of finite quantum dissipation. We consider the archetype cases of a damped harmonic oscillator and a free quantum Brownian particle. A main finding is that…
Spontaneous symmetry-breaking in phase transitions occurs when the system Hamiltonian is symmetric under a certain transformation, but the equilibrium states observed in nature are not. Here, we prove that when a discrete symmetry is…
Recent progress in manipulating atomic and condensed matter systems has instigated a surge of interest in non-equilibrium physics, including many-body dynamics of trapped ultracold atoms and ions, near-field radiative heat transfer, and…
The thermal or equilibrium ensemble is one of the most ubiquitous states of matter. For models comprised of many locally interacting quantum particles, it describes a wide range of physical situations, relevant to condensed matter physics,…
We study the stationary states of a quantum mechanical system describing an atom coupled to black-body radiation at positive temperature. The stationary states of the non-interacting system are given by product states, where the particle is…
We study properties of steady states (states with time-independent density operators) of systems of coupled harmonic oscillators. Formulas are derived showing how adiabatic change of the Hamiltonian transforms one steady state into another.…
We formulate a mixed-state analog of the NLTS conjecture [FH14] by asking whether there exist topologically-ordered systems for which the thermal Gibbs state for constant temperature is globally-entangled in the sense that it cannot even be…
We show that a local measurement of temperature and voltage for a quantum system in steady state, arbitrarily far from equilibrium, with arbitrary interactions within the system, is unique when it exists. This is interpreted as a…
We study a quantum mechanical toy model that mimics some features of a quenched phase transition. Both by virtue of a time-dependent Hamiltonian or by changing the temperature of the bath we are able to show that even after classicalization…
The dynamics of an open system crucially depends on the correlation function of its environment, $C_B(t)$. We show that for thermal non-Harmonic environments $C_B(t)$ may not decay to zero but to an offset, $C_0>0$. The presence of such…
Classical thermodynamics is built with the concept of equilibrium states. However, it is less clear how equilibrium thermodynamics emerges through the dynamics that follows the principle of quantum mechanics. In this paper, we develop a…
In this work, we show how Gibbs or thermal states appear dynamically in closed quantum many-body systems, building on the program of dynamical typicality. We introduce a novel perturbation theorem for physically relevant weak system-bath…
Emulating thermal observables on a digital quantum computer is essential for quantum simulation of many-body physics. However, thermalization typically requires a large system size due to incorporating a thermal bath, whilst limited…
The uncertainty principle guarantees a non-zero value for the positional uncertainty, $\left\langle \Delta x^2\right\rangle > 0$, even without thermal fluctuations. This implies that quantum fluctuations inherently enhance positional…
In this work we investigate the equilibration dynamics after a sudden Hamiltonian quench of a quantum spin system initially prepared in a thermal state. To characterize the equilibration we evaluate the Loschmidt echo, a global measure for…
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…
We study transient thermal processes in infinite harmonic crystals with complex (polyatomic) lattice. Initially particles have zero displacements and random velocities such that distribution of temperature is spatially uniform. Initial…