Equilibration of an isolated quantum many-body system

Vyacheslav I. Yukalov

Quntao Zhuang, Biao Wu

Henrik Wilming, Thiago R. de Oliveira, Anthony J. Short +1 more

Talía L. M. Lezama, Eduardo Jonathan Torres-Herrera, Francisco Pérez-Bernal +2 more

Isolated many-body quantum systems quenched far from equilibrium can eventually equilibrate, but it is not yet clear how long they take to do so. To answer this question, we use exact numerical methods and analyze the entire evolution, from perturbation to equilibration, of a paradigmatic disordered many-body quantum system in the chaotic regime. We investigate how the equilibration time depends on the system size and observables. We show that if dynamical manifestations of spectral correlations in the form of the correlation hole (``ramp'') are taken into account, the time for equilibration scales exponentially with system size, while if they are neglected, the scaling is better described by a power law with system size, although with an exponent larger than what is expected for diffusive transport.

Daniel Nickelsen, Michael Kästner

We introduce structured random matrix ensembles, constructed to model many-body quantum systems with local interactions. These ensembles are employed to study equilibration of isolated many-body quantum systems, showing that rather complex matrix structures, well beyond Wigner's full or banded random matrices, are required to faithfully model equilibration times. Viewing the random matrices as connectivities of graphs, we analyse the resulting network of classical oscillators in Hilbert space with tools from network theory. One of these tools, called the maximum flow value, is found to be an excellent proxy for equilibration times. Since maximum flow values are less expensive to compute, they give access to approximate equilibration times for system sizes beyond those accessible by exact diagonalisation.

Gershon Kurizki, Abraham G. Kofman