The approach to thermal equilibrium in quantized chaotic systems

DOI10.1088/0305-4470/32/7/007zbMATH Open1055.81561arXivcond-mat/9809360OpenAlexW3098673762WikidataQ56698536 ScholiaQ56698536MaRDI QIDQ4258363

Author name not available (Why is that?)

Publication date: 1999

Published in: (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We consider many-body quantum systems that exhibit quantum chaos, in the sense that the observables of interest act on energy eigenstates like banded random matrices. We study the time-dependent expectation values of these observables, assuming that the system is in a definite (but arbitrary) pure quantum state. We induce a probability distribution for the expectation values by treating the zero of time as a uniformly distributed random variable. We show explicitly that if an observable has a nonequilibrium expectation value at some particular moment, then it is overwhelmingly likely to move towards equilibrium, both forwards and backwards in time. For deviations from equilibrium that are not much larger than a typical quantum or thermal fluctuation, we find that the time dependence of the move towards equilibrium is given by the Kubo correlation function, in agreement with Onsager's postulate. These results are independent of the details of the system's quantum state.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9809360

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

No records found.

This page was built for publication: The approach to thermal equilibrium in quantized chaotic systems

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q4258363)