Related papers: Symmetry-prohibited thermalization after a quantum…
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.…
It is believed that thermalization in closed systems of interacting particles can occur only when the eigenstates are fully delocalized and chaotic in the preferential (unperturbed) basis of the total Hamiltonian. Here we demonstrate that…
We observe that the many-body eigenstates of any quadratic, fermionic Hamiltonian with sublattice symmetry have quantized entanglement entropies between the sublattices: the entanglement comes in multiple singlets. Moreover, such systems…
We elucidate how the presence of higher-form symmetries affects the dynamics of thermalization in isolated quantum systems. Under reasonable assumptions, we analytically show that a $p$-form symmetry in a $(d+1)$-dimensional quantum field…
We investigate quenches of holographic theories in a confined phase, where the energy injected is insufficient to reach the deconfined phase. In such quenches, thermalization is not associated with gravitational collapse and the formation…
Synthetic horizons in models for quantum matter provide an alternative route to explore fundamental questions of modern gravitational theory. Here, we apply these concepts to the problem of emergence of thermal quantum states in the…
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…
On a quantum superconducting processor we observe partial and infinite-temperature thermalization induced by a sequence of repeated quantum projective measurements, interspersed by a unitary (Hamiltonian) evolution. Specifically, on a qubit…
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…
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…
Macroscopic quantum superpositions are widely believed to be unobservable because large systems cannot be perfectly isolated from their environments. Here, we show that even under perfect isolation, intrinsic unitary dynamics with the…
We establish a link between unitary relaxation dynamics after a quench in closed many-body systems and the entanglement in the energy eigenbasis. We find that even if reduced states equilibrate, they can have memory on the initial…
Using the ergodicity principle for the expectation values of several types of observables, we investigate the thermalization process in isolated fermionic systems. These are described by the two-body random ensemble, which is a paradigmatic…
We investigate the relation between thermalization following a quantum quench and many-body localization in quasiparticle space in terms of the long-time full distribution function of physical observables. In particular, expanding on our…
We study the Hamiltonian dynamics of the spherical spin model with fully-connected two-body interactions drawn from a Gaussian probability distribution. In the statistical physics framework, the potential energy is of the so-called $p=2$…
How should one define thermodynamic quantities (internal energy, work, heat, etc.) for quantum systems coupled to their environments strongly? We examine three (classically equivalent) definitions of a quantum system's internal energy under…
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…
In an isolated quantum many-body system undergoing unitary evolution, the entropy of a subsystem (smaller than half the system size) thermalizes if at long times, it is to leading order equal to the thermodynamic entropy of the subsystem at…
We review the non-equilibrium dynamics of many-body quantum systems after a quantum quench with spatial inhomogeneities, either in the Hamiltonian or in the initial state. We focus on integrable and many-body localized systems that fail to…
Equilibrium properties of many-body systems with a large number of degrees of freedom are generally expected to be described by statistical mechanics. Such expectations are closely tied to the observation of thermalization, as manifested…