Typical fast thermalization processes in closed many-body systems

Peter Reimann ()
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Peter Reimann: Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract The 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 very successful general framework to cope with this problem. However, far from equilibrium, only very few quantitative and comparably universal results are known. Here a quantum mechanical prediction of this type is derived and verified against various experimental and numerical data from the literature. It quantitatively describes the entire temporal relaxation towards thermal equilibrium for a large class (in a mathematically precisely defined sense) of closed many-body systems, whose initial state may be arbitrarily far from equilibrium.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10821

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