Related papers: Thermalization, Viscosity and the Averaged Null En…
Why is thermalisation a universal phenomenon? How does a quantum system reach thermodynamical equilibrium? These questions are not new, dating even from the very birth of quantum theory and have been the subject of a renewed interest over…
Dynamical properties of a generic null surface are known to have a thermodynamic interpretation. Such an interpretation is completely based on an analogy between the usual law of thermodynamics and structure of gravitational field equation…
Isolated quantum system in a pure state may be perceived as thermal if only substantially small fraction of all degrees of freedom is probed. We propose that in a chaotic quantum many-body system all states with sufficiently small energy…
The thermalization of a gas towards a Maxwellian velocity distribution with the background temperature is described by a kinetic relaxation model. The sum of the kinetic energy of the gas and the thermal energy of the background are…
Infrared observations of Sgr A$^*$ and M87$^*$ are incompatible with the assumption that these sources have physical surfaces in thermal equilibrium with their accreting environments. In this paper we discuss a general parametrization of…
The imposition of boundary conditions upon a quantized field can lead to singular energy densities on the boundary. We treat the boundaries as quantum mechanical objects with a nonzero position uncertainty, and show that the singular energy…
It is shown that the averaged null energy condition is fulfilled for a dense, translationally invariant set of vector states in any local quantum field theory in two-dimensional Minkowski spacetime whenever the theory has a mass gap and…
We consider thermal QCD in the large N_C limit, mainly in 1+1 dimensions. The gauge coupling is only taken into account to minimal order, by projection onto colour singlets. An expression for the free energy, exact as N_C goes to infinity,…
We investigate dynamical equilibration of expectation values in closed quantum systems for realistic non-equilibrium initial states. Thereby we find that the corresponding long time expectation values depend on the initial expectation…
Thermalization of isolated many-body systems is demonstrated by generalizing an approach originally due to von Neumann: For arbitrary initial states with a macroscopically well-defined energy, quantum mechanical expectation values become…
We investigate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) for a translationally invariant quantum spin system on the $d$-dimensional cubic lattice under the periodic boundary conditions. It is known that the ETH holds in this model for…
Thermal behavior in subsystems of closed quantum systems is commonly attributed to dynamical chaos, quantum ergodicity, canonical typicality, or the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, suggesting a fundamentally statistical origin of…
In these lectures, I will attempt a pedagogical and qualitative introduction to the theory of equilibrium and thermalization of quark-gluon plasmas. I assume only that the reader is familiar with quantum field theory at zero temperature and…
In an isolated quantum many-body system undergoing unitary evolution, we study the thermalization of a subsystem, treating the rest of the system as a bath. In this setting, the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) was proposed to…
A class of autonomous quantum heat baths satisfying the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) criteria is proposed. We show that such systems are expected to cause thermal relaxation of much smaller quantum systems coupled to one of…
Energy-filtered quantum states are promising candidates for efficiently simulating thermal states. We explore a protocol designed to transition a product state into an eigenstate located in the middle of the spectrum; this is achieved by…
The relationship between thermodynamics and statistical physics is valid in the thermodynamic limit - when the number of particles becomes very large. Here, we study thermodynamics in the opposite regime - at both the nano scale, and when…
The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources…
We review different aspects of field theory at zero and finite temperature, related to the theory of phase transitions. We discuss different renormalization conditions for the effective potential at zero temperature, emphasizing in…
We extend previous work showing that violation of the null energy condition implies instability in a broad class of models, including gauge theories with scalar and fermionic matter as well as any perfect fluid. Simple examples are given to…