Equilibrium States

G. B. Furman, V. Meerovich, Vladimir Sokolovsky

It was recently shown that entanglement in quantum systems being in a nonequilibrium state can appear at much higher temperatures than in an equilibrium state. However, any system is subject to the natural relaxation process establishing equilibrium. The work deals with the numerical study of entanglement dynamics in a dipolar coupled spin-1/2 system under the transition from a nonequilibrium state to an equilibrium state. The spin system is characterized by a two-temperature density matrix, and the process of the establishment of equilibrium is in the equalization of these temperatures. The method of the nonequilibrium statistical operator is used to describe the evolution of the system. The process of establishing an equilibrium state in the homonuclear spin systems at low temperature was first considered. It was shown that the time dependencies of the inverse temperatures of the spin subsystems are given by a solution of nonlinear equations in contrast to the linear equations in the well-known high-temperature approximation. We have first studied the entanglement dynamics during the equilibrium state establishment and have found that the concurrence changes nonmonotonically with time and temperatures while equilibrium is being established. Entanglement fades long before equilibrium is established in the system. It was shown that the entanglement dynamics depends strongly on the ratio of the Zeeman energy to the dipolar energy. At a high ratio, the concurrence in the system decreases quickly for a time of about 100 $\ensuremath{\mu}\text{s}$ whereas, at a low ratio, establishment of equilibrium and fading entanglement takes a prolonged time up to 1 $\text{ms}$.

Rishabh Jha

Ángel L. Corps, Armando Relaño

Spontaneous symmetry breaking in phase transitions occurs when the system Hamiltonian is symmetric under a certain transformation, but the equilibrium states observed in nature are not. Here we build two noncommuting quantities from the order parameter of the transition and the symmetry operator that are constants of motion when such equilibrium states exist. Then, we derive a general equilibrium ensemble for the ordered phase and show that equilibrium states consisting of superpositions of different symmetry-breaking states, like positive and negative magnetized states, may exist. We propose an experimental realization of such equilibrium states with the state-of-the-art quantum technologies, and test it by means of numerical calculations. Finally, we show that a small symmetry-breaking perturbation in the Hamiltonian stabilizes the conservation of one of the two former quantities, implying that symmetry-breaking equilibrium states become stable even in small quantum systems.

Walter Greiner, Ludwig Neise, Horst Stöcker B

Brian P. Anderson

Luigi Accardi, Kentaro Imafuku, С. В. Козырев

The stimulated emission from an atom interacting with radiation in non-equilibrium state is considered. The stochastic limit, applied to the non-relativistic Hamiltonian describing the interaction, shows that the state of atoms, driven by some non-equilibrium state of the field approaches a stationary state which can continuously emit photon, unlike the case with an equilibrium state.