Post-thermalization via information spreading in open quantum systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the phenomenon of post-thermalization in open quantum systems, showing how environment correlations evolve and reconvert, with simulations revealing conditions that suppress this behavior due to non-Markovian effects or interactions.

Contribution

It provides a detailed simulation-based analysis of post-thermalization, highlighting the role of system-environment correlations and their reconversion in open quantum systems.

Findings

Post-thermalization involves environment entropy change beyond system relaxation.

Correlation reconversion from system-bath to environment degrees of freedom explains this phenomenon.

Non-Markovian dynamics and interactions can suppress post-thermalization effects.

Abstract

Thermalization in open systems coupled to macroscopic environments is usually analyzed from the perspective of relaxation of the reduced state of the system to the equilibrium state. Less emphasis is given to the change of the state of the bath. However, as previously shown for some specific models, during the thermalization the environment may undergo a nontrivial dynamics, indicated by the the change of its von Neumann entropy, at time scales even longer than the relaxation time of the system; here such a behavior is nicknamed as post-thermalization. We provide a more detailed analysis of this phenomenon by simulating the full dynamics of a variety of systems together with their environment. In particular, the post-thermalization is qualitatively explained as a result of reconversion of the initially built up correlation between the system and the bath into the correlation between the degrees of freedom in the environment. We also present exemplary systems in which such a reconversion is suppressed due to non-Markovian dynamics or the presence of interactions.