Quantum equilibration in finite time
By Anthony J. Short, Terry Farrelly. 2011
234 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It has recently been shown that small quantum subsystems generically equilibrate, in the sense that they spend most of the time close to a fixed equilibrium state. This relies on just two assumptions: that the state is spread over many different energies, and that the Hamiltonian has non-degenerate energy gaps. Given the same assumptions, it has also been shown that closed systems equilibrate with respect to realistic measurements. We extend these results in two important ways. Firstly, we prove equilibration over a finite (rather than infinite) time-interval, allowing us to bound the equilibration time. Secondly, we weaken the non-degenerate energy gaps condition, showing that equilibration occurs provided that no energy gap is hugely degenerate.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fef6bba6d70962c186e2553f61195567d4785df4
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In Artificial Intelligence
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Aspects of non-equilibrium in classical and quantum systems: Slow relaxation and glasses, dynamical large deviations, quantum non-ergodicity, and open quantum dynamics (2017, background): “Generic quantum many-body systems - evolving unitarily according to their Hamiltonian - are said to equilibrate, meaning that at long times their state becomes indistinguishable, from the point of view of expectation values of observables, from the time-integrated state [51, 52, 53, 54, 55]; for rev”