Related papers: Prethermalization with negative specific heat
The evaluation of the specific heat of an open, damped quantum system is a subtle issue. One possible route is based on the thermodynamic partition function which is the ratio of the partition functions of system plus bath and of the bath…
Statistical mechanics underlies our understanding of macroscopic quantum systems. It is based on the assumption that out-of-equilibrium systems rapidly approach their equilibrium states, forgetting any information about their microscopic…
While a clean driven system generically absorbs energy until it reaches `infinite temperature', it may do so very slowly exhibiting what is known as a prethermal regime. Here, we show that the emergence of an additional approximately…
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…
Based on the view that thermal equilibrium should be characterized through macroscopic observations, we develop a general theory about typicality of thermal equilibrium and the approach to thermal equilibrium in macroscopic quantum systems.…
We investigate the thermalization of a stochastic system with discrete phase space, initially at equilibrium at temperature $T_i$ and then termalizing in an environment at temperature $T_f$ , considering both cases $T_i > T_f$ and $T_i <…
A key feature of non-equilibrium thermodynamics is the Markovian, deterministic relaxation of coarse observables such as, for example, the temperature difference between two macroscopic objects which evolves independently of almost all…
Aggregation transitions in disordered mesoscopic systems play an important role in several areas of knowledge, from materials science to biology. The lack of a thermodynamic limit in systems that are intrinsically finite makes the…
The thermodynamic properties of strongly correlated system with binary type of disorder are investigated using the combination of the coherent potential approximation and dynamical mean-field theory. The specific heat has a peak at small…
We review a series of experimental studies of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium processes at the microscale. In particular, in these experiments we studied the fluctuations of the thermodynamic properties of a single optically-trapped…
The understanding of the emergence of equilibrium statistical mechanics has progressed significantly thanks to developments from typicality, canonical and dynamical, and from the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Here we focus on a…
The Mpemba effect denotes an anomalous relaxation phenomenon where a system initially at a hot temperature cools faster than a system that starts at a less elevated temperature. We introduce an isothermal analog of this effect for a system…
In certain special circumstances, such as in the vicinity of a black hole or in a uniformly accelerating frame, vacuum fluctuations appear to give rise to a finite-temperature environment. This effect, currently without experimental…
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…
Quantum thermodynamics aims at investigating both the emergence and the limits of the laws of thermodynamics from a quantum mechanical microscopic approach. In this scenario, thermodynamic processes with no heat exchange, namely, adiabatic…
We study the dynamics of thermalization resulting from a time-dependent noise in a Quantum Ising Chain subject to a sudden quench of the transverse magnetic field. For weak noise the dynamics shows a pre-thermalized state at intermediate…
We study the thermalization of a composite quantum system consisting of several subsystems, where only a small one of the subsystem contacts with a heat bath in equilibrium, while the rest of the composite system is contact free. We show…
We review exact approaches and recent results related to the relaxation dynamics and description after relaxation of various one-dimensional lattice systems of hard-core bosons after a sudden quench. We first analyze the integrable case,…
For open quantum systems coupled to a thermal bath at inverse temperature $\beta$, it is well known that under the Born-, Markov-, and secular approximations the system density matrix will approach the thermal Gibbs state with the bath…
Systems with long range interactions in general are not additive, which can lead to an inequivalence of the microcanonical and canonical ensembles. The microcanonical ensemble may show richer behavior than the canonical one, including…