Extremely quick thermalization in a macroscopic quantum system for a typical nonequilibrium subspace
Statistical Mechanics
2015-06-18 v1 Mathematical Physics
math.MP
Quantum Physics
Abstract
The fact that macroscopic systems approach thermal equilibrium may seem puzzling, for example, because it may seem to conflict with the time-reversibility of the microscopic dynamics. We here prove that in a macroscopic quantum system for a typical choice of "nonequilibrium subspace", any initial state indeed thermalizes, and in fact does so very quickly, on the order of the Boltzmann time . Therefore what needs to be explained is, not that macroscopic systems approach equilibrium, but that they do so slowly.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1402.0324,
title = {Extremely quick thermalization in a macroscopic quantum system for a typical nonequilibrium subspace},
author = {Sheldon Goldstein and Takashi Hara and Hal Tasaki},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.0324},
year = {2015}
}
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5 pages