Relaxation and Prethermalization in an Isolated Quantum System
By M. Gring, M. Kuhnert, Tim Langen, Takuya Kitagawa, B. Rauer, M. Schreitl, I. Mazets, D. Smith, E. Demler, Jörg Schmiedmayer. Science, 2011
841 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Prethermalization When a physical system is subjected to a rapid change of conditions (for example, a gas of atoms is allowed to occupy a volume twice the size of the original container), it quickly achieves a new temperature (thermalizes) through collisions. However, in some quantum systems many conserved variables inhibit thermalization; understanding the phases the systems go through in the slowing process is of great interest to cosmologists and physicists. Gring et al. (p. 1318, published online 31 August) separate an ultracold one-dimensional gas of bosonic atoms into two nearly identical halves, and follow how local differences in phase between the halves evolve in time by examining their interference. Initially, the local phases are almost identical, but a rapid decoherence ensues, followed by a very slow further decay. The authors analyze the relative state reached after the initial fast decay and find that it can be described by an equilibrium function with an effective temperature several times less than the initial temperature. Because this cannot be the final state of the system, the authors term the initial process prethermalization. Two halves of a split ultracold gas of rubidium atoms retain memory of the initial state for an extended time. Understanding relaxation processes is an important unsolved problem in many areas of physics. A key challenge is the scarcity of experimental tools for the characterization of complex transient states. We used measurements of full quantum mechanical probability distributions of matter-wave interference to study the relaxation dynamics of a coherently split one-dimensional Bose gas and obtained comprehensive information about the dynamical states of the system. After an initial rapid evolution, the full distributions reveal the approach toward a thermal-like steady state characterized by an effective temperature that is independent from the initial equilibrium temperature of the system before the splitting process. We conjecture that this state can be described through a generalized Gibbs ensemble and associate it with prethermalization.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34c6bee2c98676f357bf6960a8d11ab0b6a26719
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Quantum thermodynamics (2015, background): “This is a result of the interplay between thermalisation and integrability [139] and was experimentally observed in [140].”
- Generalized Gibbs ensemble in integrable lattice models (2016, background): “Such steady states, now called prethermalized states, have also been obtained and thoroughly studied in a remarkable set of experiments with weakly interacting Bose gases in atom chips [24, 25, 26]”
- Keldysh field theory for driven open quantum systems (2015, background): “Dynamics — Addressing the time evolution of open systems adds a new twist to the question of thermalization [32, 37, 335, 336] or, more generally, equilibration of quantum systems.”
- Quantum quenches in 1 + 1 dimensional conformal field theories (2016, methodology): “prethermalization [174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 179, 181, 73, 182] in models with weak integrability breaking.”