Related papers: Typicality of Prethermalization
Common intuition tells us that if one part of a connected system is cooled continuously, the other parts should also cool down. This intuition can be given a microscopic foundation for the case of a generic quantum system coupled to a…
It is argued that a typical many body energy eigenstate has a well defined thermodynamic entropy and that individual eigenstates possess thermodynamic characteristics analogous to those of generic isolated systems. We examine large systems…
In the present note, we discuss a simple example of a macroscopic quantum many-body system in which the approach to thermal equilibrium from an arbitrary initial state in the microcanonical energy shell is proved without relying on any…
Recently, there have been significant new insights concerning conditions under which closed systems equilibrate locally. The question if subsystems thermalize---if the equilibrium state is independent of the initial state---is however much…
According to conventional wisdom, a system placed in an environment with a different temperature tends to relax to the temperature of the latter, mediated by the flows of heat and/or matter that are set solely by the temperature difference.…
The many-body localization (MBL) phase transition is not a conventional thermodynamic phase transition. Thus to define the phase transition one should allow the possibility of taking the limit of an infinite system in a way that is not the…
Prethermalization occurs as an important phase in the dynamics of many-body systems when strong coupling drives a quasi-equilibrium in a subspace separated from the thermodynamic equilibrium by the restriction of a gap in energy or other…
The dynamics of a many-body system can take many forms, from a purely reversible evolution to fast thermalization. Here we show experimentally and numerically that an assembly of spin 1 atoms all in the same spatial mode allows one to…
We study the relaxation dynamics of interacting, one-dimensional fermions with band curvature after a weak quench in the interaction parameter. After the quench, the system is described by a non-equilibrium initial state, which relaxes…
The recent discovery that for large Hilbert spaces, almost all (that is, typical) Hamiltonians have eigenstates that place small subsystems in thermal equilibrium, has shed much light on the origins of irreversibility and thermalization.…
Thermalization of an isolated quantum system has been a nontrivial problem since the early days of quantum mechanics. In generic isolated quantum systems, nonequilibrium dynamics is expected to result in thermalization, indicating the…
By developing a semi-classical analysis based on the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis, we determine the long time behavior of a large spin evolving with a nonlinear Hamiltonian. Despite integrable classical dynamics, we find the…
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…
Two identical finite quantum systems prepared initially at different temperatures, isolated from the environment, and subsequently brought into contact are demonstrated to relax towards Gibbs-like quasi-equilibrium states with a common…
Dissipative structures are generally observed when a system relaxes from a far from equilibrium state. To address the reverse question given by the title, we investigate the relaxation process in a closed chemical reaction-diffusion system…
Nonintegrability plays a crucial role in thermalization and transport processes in many-body Hamiltonian systems, yet its quantitative effects remain unclear. To reveal the connection between the macroscopic relaxation properties and the…
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…
In quantum statistical mechanics, closed many-body systems that do not exhibit thermalization after an arbitrarily long time in spite of the presence of interactions are called as many-body localized systems, and recently have been…
At a composition far above the percolation threshold, the resistance of a composite sample increases with time due to Joule heating as a constant current of sufficiently large value is passed through the sample. If the current is less than…
We develop a rigorous system-agnostic method to predict quantum thermalization in an overwhelming fraction of accessible pure states in a many-body system, entirely in terms of certain out-of-time-ordered correlators of few-body…