Local emergence of thermal correlations in an isolated quantum many-body system
By Tim Langen, R. Geiger, M. Kuhnert, B. Rauer, J. Schmiedmayer. Nature Physics, 2013
352 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The relaxation mechanisms of isolated quantum many-body systems are insufficiently understood, but a one-dimensional quantum gas experiment uncovers the local emergence of thermal correlations and their cone-like propagation through the system. Understanding the dynamics of isolated quantum many-body systems is a central open problem at the intersection between statistical physics and quantum physics. Despite important theoretical effort1, no generic framework exists yet to understand when and how an isolated quantum system relaxes to a steady state. Regarding the question of how, it has been conjectured2,3 that equilibration must occur on a local scale in systems where correlations between distant points can establish only at a finite speed. Here, we provide the first experimental observation of this local equilibration hypothesis. In our experiment, we quench a one-dimensional Bose gas by coherently splitting it into two parts. By monitoring the phase coherence between the two parts we observe that the thermal correlations of a prethermalized state4,5 emerge locally in their final form and propagate through the system in a light-cone-like evolution. Our results underline the close link between the propagation of correlations 2,3,6,7 and relaxation processes in quantum many-body systems.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac6dd05e4b32171ddcc76605d028ae9b381ada4d
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
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Citations in the corpus
- Quantum quenches in 1 + 1 dimensional conformal field theories (2016, background): “The non-equilibrium quench dynamics of isolated quantum systems is a subject under intense theoretical investigation, triggered in part by recent experiments on trapped ultra-cold atomic gases [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11].”
- Onset of many-body chaos in the $O(N)$ model (2017, background): “Issues of thermalization have recently received renewed attention, due in part to numerous experiments probing quantum dynamics in approximately closed systems [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] as well as new theoretical tools, like AdS/CFT duality, which are able to address dynamics in isolated strongly inte”
- Observing the Space- and Time-Dependent Growth of Correlations in Dynamically Tuned Synthetic Ising Models with Antiferromagnetic Interactions (2017, background): “Finite propagation speeds for correlations and other signals are well explored in the context of sudden quench protocols with constant postquench Hamiltonians [18,20,23,47,48], but their importance for state-preparation protocols (with a time-dependent Hamiltonian) is not equally well known (see App”
- Signatures of integrability in the dynamics of Rydberg-blockaded chains (2018, background): “initial state memory when spatial inhomogeneities are strong, and long-lived prethermal states near special integrable points [4–14].”
- Quench dynamics and relaxation in isolated integrable quantum spin chains (2016, background): “Since the work of Calabrese and Cardy light cone eects after quantum quenches have been analyzed in a number of lattice models [25–27, 48, 182–185] and observed in experiments on systems of ultra-cold atomic gases [9, 10] and trapped ions [16, 17].”