Related papers: Controlling local thermal states in classical many…
When a non-integrable system evolves out of equilibrium for a long time, local observables are expected to attain stationary expectation values, independent of the details of the initial state. However, intriguing experimental results with…
We provide a pedagogical introduction to eigenstate thermalization. This phenomenon, which occurs in generic quantum systems, allows one to understand why thermalization takes place in isolated systems under unitary dynamics. We motivate…
We consider a many-body localized system coupled globally to a central $d$-level system. Under an appropriate scaling of $d$ and $L$, we find evidence that the localized phase survives. We argue for two possible thermalizing phases,…
In the presence of disorder, an interacting closed quantum system can undergo many-body localization (MBL) and fail to thermalize. However, over long times even weak couplings to any thermal environment will necessarily thermalize the…
The question of how systems respond to perturbations is ubiquitous in physics. Predicting this response for large classes of systems becomes particularly challenging if many degrees of freedom are involved and linear response theory cannot…
Fluctuation theorems are fundamental extensions of the second law of thermodynamics for small nonequilibrium systems. While work and heat are equally important forms of energy exchange, fluctuation relations have not been experimentally…
Virtually all electronic systems try to optimize a fundamental trade-off between higher performance and lower power consumption. The latter becomes critical in mobile computing systems, such as smartphones, which rely on passive cooling.…
Deriving conditions under which a macroscopic system thermalizes directly from the underlying quantum many-body dynamics of its microscopic constituents is a long-standing challenge in theoretical physics. The well-known eigenstate…
We explore the response of many-body localized (MBL) systems to periodic driving of arbitrary amplitude, focusing on the rate at which they exchange energy with the drive. To this end, we introduce an infinite-temperature generalization of…
This thesis is devoted to the theoretical study of slow thermodynamic processes in non-equilibrium stochastic systems. Its main result is a physically and mathematically consistent construction of relevant thermodynamic quantities in the…
Prethermalization refers to the physical phenomenon where a system evolves toward some long-lived non-equilibrium steady state before eventual thermalization sets in. One general scenario where this occurs is in driven systems with dynamics…
In this work, we show how Gibbs or thermal states appear dynamically in closed quantum many-body systems, building on the program of dynamical typicality. We introduce a novel perturbation theorem for physically relevant weak system-bath…
We investigate a two-level system in resonant contact with a larger environment. The environment typically is in a canonical state with a given temperature initially. Depending on the precise spectral structure of the environment and the…
We present a study of thermalisation of a small isolated Hubbard lattice cluster prepared in a pure state with a well-defined energy. We examine how a two-site subsystem of the lattice thermalises with the rest of the system as its…
When two solids at different temperatures are separated by a vacuum gap they relax toward their equilibrium state by exchanging heat either by radiation, phonon or electron tunneling, depending on their separation distance and on the nature…
Thermalization is a ubiquitous process of statistical physics, in which details of few-body observables are washed out in favor of a featureless steady state. Even in isolated quantum many-body systems, limited to reversible dynamics,…
Small thermodynamic systems exhibit peculiar behavior different from that observed in long-scale systems. Non-equilibrium processes taking place in those systems are strongly influenced by the presence of fluctuations which can be large.…
Recent theoretical and numerical evidence suggests that localization can survive in disordered many-body systems with very high energy density, provided that interactions are sufficiently weak. Stronger interactions can destroy…
We show that, in nonequilibrium systems with small heat flows, there is a time-scale dependent effective temperature which plays the same role as the thermodynamical temperature, in that it controls the direction of heat flows and acts as a…
In traditional thermodynamics, temperature is a local quantity: a subsystem of a large thermal system is in a thermal state at the same temperature as the original system. For strongly interacting systems, however, the locality of…