Related papers: Analytic and Numerical Study of Preheating Dynamic…
We investigate the role of large amplitude sub-critical thermal fluctuations in the dynamics of first order phase transitions. In particular, we obtain a kinetic equation for the number density of sub-critical fluctuations of the…
Periodically driven many-body systems generally heat towards a featureless 'infinite-temperature' state. As an alternative to uniform heating in a clean system, here we establish a Floquet superheating regime, where fast heating nucleates…
We propose a new mechanism of non-thermal particle production during inflation based on a narrow parametric resonance, akin to the dynamics of post-inflationary preheating. The mechanism is based on the production of scalar particles with a…
We numerically simulate a thermalization process in an energy landscape with hierarchically organized metastable states. The initial configuration is chosen to have a large energy excess, relative to the thermal equilibrium value at the…
A positive rate of entropy production at steady state is a distinctive feature of truly non-equilibrium processes. Exact results, while being often limited to simple models, offer a unique opportunity to explore the thermodynamic features…
We investigate Brownian motions of a particle coupled to vacuum fluctuations of a quantum field. The Unruh effect predicts that an observer in an accelerated motion sees the Minkowski vacuum as thermally excited. This addresses the problem…
Fluctuations of scalar fields produced at the stage of preheating after inflation are so large that they can break supersymmetry much stronger than inflation itself. These fluctuations may lead to symmetry restoration along flat directions…
The dynamics of isolated quantum systems following a sudden quench plays a central role in many areas of material science, high-energy physics, and quantum chemistry. Featuring complex phenomena with implications for thermalization,…
In this paper we show that a normal total number-of-particle fluctuation can be obtained consistently from the static thermodynamic relation and dynamic compressibility sum rule. In models using the broken U(1) gauge symmetry, in order to…
We study analytically the probability distribution of the heat released by an ensemble of harmonic oscillators to the thermal bath, in the nonequilibrium relaxation process following a temperature quench. We focus on the asymmetry…
The foundations of statistical mechanics, namely how equilibrium hypothesis emerges microscopically from quantum theory, is explored through investigating the environment-induced quantum decoherence processes. Based on the recent results on…
We consider reheating in a class of asymptotically safe quantum field theories recently studied in \cite{Litim:2014uca, Litim:2015iea}. These theories allow for an inflationary phase in the very early universe. Inflation ends with a period…
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…
The uncertainty principle guarantees a non-zero value for the positional uncertainty, $\left\langle \Delta x^2\right\rangle > 0$, even without thermal fluctuations. This implies that quantum fluctuations inherently enhance positional…
Non-equilibrium time evolution in isolated many-body quantum systems generally results in thermalization. However, the relaxation process can be very slow, and quasi-stationary non-thermal plateaux are often observed at intermediate times.…
We study the out-of-equilibrium nonlinear dynamics of fields after post-inflationary preheating. During preheating, the energy in the homogeneous inflaton is exponentially rapidly transfered into highly occupied out-of-equilibrium…
Reheating after inflation occurs due to particle production by the oscillating inflaton field. In this paper we describe the perturbative approach to reheating, and then concentrate on effects beyond the perturbation theory. They are…
Preheating after inflation may lead to nonthermal phase transitions with symmetry restoration. These phase transitions may occur even if the total energy density of fluctuations produced during reheating is relatively small as compared with…
Having established the fact that interacting classical kicked rotor systems exhibit long-lived prethermal phase with quasi-conserved average Hamiltonian before entering into chaotic heating regime, we use spatio-temporal fluctuation…
Analytic results are presented for preheating in both flat and open models of chaotic inflation, for the case of massless inflaton decay into further inflaton quanta. It is demonstrated that preheating in both these cases closely resembles…