Typical fast thermalization processes in closed many-body systems.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26926224.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/ncomms10821 and PMC identifier 4773511.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The 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. However, far from equilibrium, only very few quantitative and comparably universal results are known. Here a 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.