Generalized Gibbs ensemble prediction of prethermalization plateaus and their relation to nonthermal steady states in integrable systems

By M. Kollar, F. A. Wolf, Martin Eckstein. 2011

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A quantum many-body system which is prepared in the ground state of an integrable Hamiltonian does not directly thermalize after a sudden small parameter quench away from integrability. Rather, it will be trapped in a prethermalized state and can thermalize only at a later stage. We discuss several examples for which this prethermalized state shares some properties with the nonthermal steady state that emerges in the corresponding integrable system. These examples support the notion that nonthermal steady states in integrable systems may be viewed as prethermalized states that never decay further. Furthermore we show that prethermalization plateaus are under certain conditions correctly predicted by generalized Gibbs ensembles, which are the appropriate extension of standard statistical mechanics in the presence of many constants of motion. This establishes that the relaxation behaviors of integrable and nearly integrable systems are continuously connected and described by the same statistical theory.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9c012138cb5518e1ab585c6e69c4feb53607168

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Pasquale Calabrese
2. J. Cardy
3. T. Takayanagi
4. E. Tonni
5. T. Nishioka
6. Thomas Hartman
7. R. Myers
8. M. Fagotti

Citations in the corpus

• Quantum quenches in 1  +  1 dimensional conformal field theories (2016, background): “prethermalization [174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 179, 181, 73, 182] in models with weak integrability breaking.”
• Prethermalization and Thermalization in Isolated Quantum Systems (2018, unknown): “[7–15].”
• Nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory and its applications (2013, unknown): “Prethermalization plateaus after an interaction quench are also correctly predicted by a GGE built from approximate constants of motion (Kollar et al., 2011).”
• Quantum thermodynamics (2015, background): “This is a result of the interplay between thermalisation and integrability [139] and was experimentally observed in [140].”