Typical fast thermalization processes in closed many-body systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new quantum mechanical prediction that accurately describes the entire process of thermalization in closed many-body systems, validated by experimental and numerical data, advancing understanding of far-from-equilibrium dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first universal quantum mechanical description of thermalization processes applicable to a broad class of closed many-body systems.

Findings

Quantitative description of thermalization dynamics

Validation against experimental data

Applicable to systems far from equilibrium

Abstract

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. Far from equilibrium, only very few quantitative and comparably universal results are known. Here, a new 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.