Related papers: Prethermalization with negative specific heat
We study the internal dynamics of an elementary quantum system placed close to a body held at a temperature different from that of the surrounding radiation. We derive general expressions for lifetime and density matrix valid for bodies of…
Ensemble inequivalence has been observed in several systems. In particular it has been recently shown that negative specific heat can arise in the microcanonical ensemble in the thermodynamic limit for systems with long-range interactions.…
It is well understood that many-body systems driven at high frequency heat up only exponentially slowly and exhibit a long prethermalization regime. We prove rigorously that a certain relevant class of systems heat very slowly under weak…
Significant attention has been devoted to the problem of thermalization of observables in isolated quantum setups by individual eigenstates. Here, we address this issue from an open quantum system perspective, examining an isolated setup…
The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) explains why chaotic quantum many-body systems thermalize internally if the Hamiltonian lacks symmetries. If the Hamiltonian conserves one quantity ("charge"), the ETH implies thermalization…
We show that, in general, any complex weakly nonlinear highly multimode system can reach thermodynamic equilibrium that is characterized by a unique temperature and chemical potential. The conditions leading to either positive or negative…
Eigenstate thermalization is widely accepted as the mechanism behind thermalization in generic isolated quantum systems. Using the example of a single magnetic defect embedded in the integrable spin-1/2 $XXZ$ chain, we show that locally…
Thermalization in highly excited quantum many-body system does not necessarily mean a complete memory loss of the way the system was formed. This effect may pave a way for a quantum computing, with a large number of qubits $n\simeq…
Understanding relaxation processes is an important unsolved problem in many areas of physics. A key challenge in studying such non-equilibrium dynamics is the scarcity of experimental tools for characterizing their complex transient states.…
We consider a soluble model of multifragmentation which is similar in spirit to many models which have been used to fit intermediate energy heavy ion collision data. In this model $c_v$ is always positive but for finite nuclei $c_p$ can be…
We consider the thermodynamic behavior of a disordered interacting electron system in two dimensions. We show that the corrections to the thermodynamic potential in the weakly localized regime give rise to a non monotonic behavior of the…
Prethermalization has been extensively studied in systems close to integrability. We propose a more general, yet conceptually simpler, setup for this phenomenon. We consider a---possibly nonintegrable---reference dynamics, weakly perturbed…
Inspired by the avalanche scenario for many-body localization (MBL) instability, we reverse the conventional set-up and ask whether a large weakly-disordered chain can thermalize a smaller, strongly-disordered chain when the composite…
We detail the experimental observation of the non-equilibrium many-body phenomenon prethermalization. We study the dynamics of a rapidly and coherently split one-dimensional Bose gas. An analysis based on the use of full quantum mechanical…
It is commonly assumed that a large system, weakly coupled to a thermal environment through its boundaries, relaxes quasistatically towards the new equilibrium even when the temperature of the environment changes abruptly. Here we show how…
We review the recent progress in the understanding of the relaxation of isolated near-integrable quantum many-body systems. Focusing on prethermalization and universal dynamics following a quench, we describe the experiments with ultracold…
Thermalization is the process through which a physical system evolves toward a state of thermal equilibrium. Determining whether or not a physical system will thermalize from an initial state has been a key question in condensed matter…
For students familiar with equilibrium statistical mechanics, the notion of a positive specific heat, being intimately related to the idea of stability, is both intuitively reasonable and mathematically provable. However, for system in…
We consider conditions under which an isolated quantum system approaches a microcanonical equilibrium state. A key component is the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis, which proposes that all energy eigenstates appear thermal. We…
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…