Related papers: Prethermalization of quantum systems interacting w…
We report a kind of quantum phase transition which takes place in isolated quantum systems with non-thermal equilibrium states and an extra symmetry that commutes with the Hamiltonian for any values of the system parameters. A critical…
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 investigate the late-time stationary states of open quantum systems coupled to a thermal reservoir in the strong coupling regime. In general such systems do not necessarily relax to a Boltzmann distribution if the coupling…
The long time accumulation of the \textit{random} actions of a single particle "reservoir" on its coupled system can transfer some temperature information of its initial state to the coupled system. This dynamic process can be referred to…
Environments in quantum thermodynamics usually take the role of heat baths. These baths are Markovian, weakly coupled to the system, and initialized in a thermal state. Whenever one of these properties is missing, standard quantum…
We study first order phase transitions that occur when the temperature of the system increases and we identify the conditions that lead to super-heating, a phase where the system can heat up arbitrarily. First order phase transitions with…
A well-isolated system often shows relaxation to a quasi-stationary state before reaching thermal equilibrium. Such a prethermalization has attracted considerable interest recently in association with closely related fundamental problems of…
Collision models provide a simple and versatile setting to capture the dynamics of open quantum systems. The standard approach to thermalisition in this setting involves an environment of independent and identically-prepared thermal qubits,…
A large number of multifaceted quantum transport processes in molecular systems and physical nanosystems can be treated in terms of quantum relaxation processes which couple to one or several fluctuating environments. A thermal equilibrium…
We establish an analytical criterion for dynamical thermalization within harmonic systems, applicable to both classical and quantum models. Specifically, we prove that thermalization of various observables, such as particle energies in…
Periodically driven closed quantum many-body systems are known to exhibit prethermal or quasi-steady-state dynamics. In this work, we theoretically show that such prethermal phases can appear in the dynamics of a dipolar two-spin-$1/2$…
When studying thermalization of quantum systems, it is typical to ask whether a system interacting with an environment will evolve towards a local thermal state. Here, we show that a more general and relevant question is "when does a system…
We investigate the dissipative dynamics of a quantum critical system in contact with a thermal bath. In analogy with the standard protocol employed to analyze aging, we study the response of a system to a sudden change of the bath…
After a sudden disruption, weakly interacting quantum systems first relax to a prethermalized state that can be described by perturbation theory and a generalized Gibbs ensemble. Using these properties of the prethermalized state we…
Collisional reservoirs are becoming a major tool for modelling open quantum systems. In their simplest implementation, an external agent switches on, for a given time, the interaction between the system and a specimen from the reservoir.…
Prethermalization refers to the transient phenomenon where a system thermalizes according to a Hamiltonian that is not the generator of its evolution. We provide here a rigorous framework for quantum spin systems where prethermalization is…
Results on heat current, entropy production rate and entanglement are reported for a quantum system coupled to two different temperature heat reservoirs. By applying a temperature gradient, different quantum states can be found with exactly…
We study the process of heat transfer through an entangled pair of two-level system, demonstrating the role of quantum correlations in this nonequilibrium process. While quantum correlations generally degrade with increasing the temperature…
For quantum systems that are weakly coupled to a much 'bigger' environment, thermalization of possibly far from equilibrium initial ensembles is demonstrated: for sufficiently large times, the ensemble is for all practical purposes…
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…