Rapid thermalization of dissipative many-body dynamics of commuting Hamiltonians

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that for certain commuting Hamiltonian models, the thermalization process is much faster than spectral gap estimates suggest, showing rapid mixing and thermalization in many-body quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel clustering notion called 'strong local indistinguishability' and proves it implies rapid mixing for a broad class of models, including high-dimensional lattices and trees.

Findings

Thermalization time is at most logarithmic in system size for these models.

Rapid mixing is proven for 1D systems with a positive spectral gap.

High-temperature systems on various lattice structures also exhibit rapid thermalization.

Abstract

Quantum systems typically reach thermal equilibrium rather quickly when coupled to a thermal environment. The usual way of bounding the speed of this process is by estimating the spectral gap of the dissipative generator. However the gap, by itself, does not always yield a reasonable estimate for the thermalization time in many-body systems: without further structure, a uniform lower bound on it only constrains the thermalization time to grow polynomially with system size. Here, instead, we show that for a large class of geometrically-2-local models of Davies generators with commuting Hamiltonians, the thermalization time is much shorter than one would na\"ively estimate from the gap: at most logarithmic in the system size. This yields the so-called rapid mixing of dissipative dynamics. The result is particularly relevant for 1D systems, for which we prove rapid thermalization with a system size independent decay rate only from a positive gap in the generator. We also prove that systems in hypercubic lattices of any dimension, and exponential graphs, such as trees, have rapid mixing at high enough temperatures. We do this by introducing a novel notion of clustering which we call "strong local indistinguishability" based on a max-relative entropy, and then proving that it implies a lower bound on the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality (MLSI) for nearest neighbour commuting models. This has consequences for the rate of thermalization towards Gibbs states, and also for their relevant Wasserstein distances and transportation cost inequalities. Along the way, we show that several measures of decay of correlations on Gibbs states of commuting Hamiltonians are equivalent, a result of independent interest. At the technical level, we also show a direct relation between properties of Davies and Schmidt dynamics, that allows to transfer results of thermalization between both.