Related papers: The approach to thermal equilibrium in quantized c…
This chapter discusses the conditions and timescales under which isolated many-body quantum systems, initially far from equilibrium, ultimately reach thermal equilibrium. We also examine quantities that, during the relaxation process,…
We consider a quantum system with $N$ degrees of freedom which is classically chaotic. When $N$ is large, and both $\hbar$ and the quantum energy uncertainty $\Delta E$ are small, quantum chaos theory can be used to demonstrate the…
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…
If a many-body quantum system approaches thermal equilibrium from a generic initial state, then the expectation value $\langle\psi(t)|A_i|\psi(t)\rangle$, where $|\psi(t)\rangle$ is the system's state vector and $A_i$ is an experimentally…
We show that a bounded, isolated quantum system of many particles in a specific initial state will approach thermal equilibrium if the energy eigenfunctions which are superposed to form that state obey {\it Berry's conjecture}. Berry's…
Simulations are performed of a small quantum system interacting with a quantum environment. The system consists of various initial states of two harmonic oscillators coupled to give normal modes. The environment is "designed" by its level…
Thermodynamical equilibrium is considered as an effect of quantum entangling of the vacuum state of a system. An explicit mathematical model of multi- particle entangled pure quantum states is developed and analyzed. In the framework, the…
An analytical prediction is established of how an isolated many-body quantum system relaxes towards its thermal long-time limit under the action of a time-independent perturbation, but still remaining sufficiently close to a reference case…
Thermalization of an isolated quantum system has been a nontrivial problem since the early days of quantum mechanics. In generic isolated quantum systems, nonequilibrium dynamics is expected to result in thermalization, indicating the…
We study whether a generic isolated quantum system initially set out of equilibrium can be considered as localized close to its initial state. Our approach considers the time evolution in the Krylov basis, which maps the dynamics onto that…
We analytically describe the decay to equilibrium of generic observables of a non-integrable system after a perturbation in the form of a random matrix. We further obtain an analytic form for the time-averaged fluctuations of an observable…
Lack of knowledge about the detailed many-particle motion on the microscopic scale is a key issue in any theoretical description of a macroscopic experiment. For systems at or close to thermal equilibrium, statistical mechanics provides a…
We consider quantum many-body systems evolving under a time-independent Hamiltonian $H$ from a nonequilibrium initial state at time $t=0$ towards a close-to-equilibrium state at time $t=\tau$. Subsequently, this state is slightly perturbed…
We develop a rigorous system-agnostic method to predict quantum thermalization in an overwhelming fraction of accessible pure states in a many-body system, entirely in terms of certain out-of-time-ordered correlators of few-body…
A quantum thermodynamic system can conserve non-commuting observables, but the consequences of this phenomenon on relaxation are still not fully understood. We investigate this problem by leveraging an observable-dependent approach to…
A framework for the investigation of disordered quantum systems in thermal equilibrium is proposed. The approach is based on a dynamical model--which consists of a combination of a double-bracket gradient flow and a uniform Brownian…
The nonequilibrium thermodynamics of interacting quantum many-body systems is investigated within the framework of thermal time-dependent density functional theory using a generalized linear-response formulation for the full quantum work…
Irreversibility, despite being a necessary condition for thermalization, still lacks a sound understanding in the context of isolated quantum many-body systems. In this work we approach this question by studying the behavior of generic…
One of the fundamental problems of quantum statistical physics is how an ideally isolated quantum system can ever reach thermal equilibrium behavior despite the unitary time evolution of quantum-mechanical systems. Here, we study, via…
We consider isolated many-body quantum systems which do not thermalize, i.e., expectation values approach an (approximately) steady longtime limit which disagrees with the microcanonical prediction of equilibrium statistical mechanics. A…