Related papers: Unitarity, ergodicity, and quantum thermodynamics
Statistical mechanics is founded on the assumption that all accessible configurations of a system are equally likely. This requires dynamics that explore all states over time, known as ergodic dynamics. In isolated quantum systems, however,…
A new microcanonical equilibrium state is introduced for quantum systems with finite-dimensional state spaces. Equilibrium is characterised by a uniform distribution on a level surface of the expectation value of the Hamiltonian. The…
Any discrete quantum process is represented by a sequence of quantum channels. We consider ergodic quantum processes obtained by a map that takes the points along the trajectory of a discrete ergodic dynamical system to the space of quantum…
We study thermalization in many-body quantum systems locally coupled to an external bath. It is shown that quantum chaotic systems do thermalize, that is, they exhibit relaxation to an invariant ergodic state which, in the bulk, is well…
A unified (classical-quantum-statistical) formalism for a system with continuous spectrum is introduced. For this kind of systems ergodicity behavior and the existence of microcanonical and canonical (KMS) equilibrium is proved. It is…
We consider an arbitrary quantum system coupled non perturbatively to a large arbitrary and fully quantum environment. In [G. Ithier and F. Benaych-Georges, Phys. Rev. A 96, 012108 (2017)] the typicality of the dynamics of such an embedded…
We study the equilibration properties of isolated ergodic quantum systems initially prepared in a cat state, i.e a macroscopic quantum superposition of states. Our main result consists in showing that, even though decoherence is at work in…
Why is thermalisation a universal phenomenon? How does a quantum system reach thermodynamical equilibrium? These questions are not new, dating even from the very birth of quantum theory and have been the subject of a renewed interest over…
For a quantum system in a macroscopically large volume $V$, prepared in a pure state and subject to maximally noisy or ergodic unitary dynamics, the reduced density matrix of any sub-system $v\ll V$ is almost surely totally mixed. We show…
One key issue of the foundation of statistical mechanics is the emergence of equilibrium ensembles in isolated and closed quantum systems. Recently, it was predicted that in the thermodynamic ($N\rightarrow\infty$) limit of large quantum…
The connection between the non-equilibrium dynamics of isolated quantum many-body systems and statistical mechanics is a fundamental open question. It is generally believed that the unitary quantum evolution of a sufficiently complex system…
For any choice of initial state and weak assumptions about the Hamiltonian, large isolated quantum systems undergoing Schrodinger evolution spend most of their time in macroscopic superposition states. The result follows from von Neumann's…
The generic behavior of quantum systems has long been of theoretical and practical interest. Any quantum process is represented by a sequence of quantum channels. We consider general ergodic sequences of stochastic channels with arbitrary…
Quantum systems are invariably open, evolving under surrounding influences rather than in isolation. Standard open quantum system methods eliminate all information on the environmental state to yield a tractable description of the system…
Envariance -- entanglement assisted invariance -- is a recently discovered symmetry of composite quantum systems. We show that thermodynamic equilibrium states are fully characterized by their envariance. In particular, the microcanonical…
We consider a system weakly interacting with a bath as a thermodynamic setting to establish a quantum foundation of statistical physics. It is shown that even if the composite system is initially in an arbitrary nonequilibrium pure quantum…
Quantum and classical systems can consistently be coupled via non-unitary time-irreversible mechanisms. In this paper we characterize which kind of corresponding dynamics converge in the stationary regime to a thermal hybrid state, that is,…
We present exact results on a novel kind of emergent random matrix universality that quantum many-body systems at infinite temperature can exhibit. Specifically, we consider an ensemble of pure states supported on a small subsystem,…
This paper is a physicist's review of the major conceptual issues concerning the problem of spectral universality in quantum systems. Here we present a unified, graph-based view of all archetypical models of such universality (billiards,…
One of the core questions of quantum physics is how to reconcile the unitary evolution of quantum states, which is information-preserving and time-reversible, with evolution following the second law of thermodynamics, which, in general, is…