The irreversible entropy increase described by the second law of thermodynamics is fundamentally tied to thermalization and the emergence of equilibrium. In the first part of our work (Ref: arXiv.2503.04152), we constructed an isolated gas system model and numerically demonstrated irreversible growth of entanglement entropy caused by erasure of spread non-equilibrium state information. Here, we mathematically prove that for a typical macroscopic system in a non-equilibrium state $|ϕ_0\rangle$, the quantum state $|ϕ'_0\rangle = \hat{O}(t)|ϕ_0\rangle$ will inevitably evolve toward equilibrium. Our work demonstrates that the second law of thermodynamics, and consequently the ergodic hypothesis in statistical physics, can be understood and proven from a quantum information perspective. From this perspective, the second law can be stated as: In typical macroscopic physical systems, the spreading and erasure of non-equilibrium information is inevitable.
We use trapped atomic ions forming a hybrid Coulomb crystal, and exploit its phonons to study an isolated quantum system composed of a single spin coupled to an engineered bosonic environment. We increase the complexity of the system by adding ions and controlling coherent couplings and, thereby, we observe the emergence of thermalization: Time averages of spin observables approach microcanonical averages while related fluctuations decay. Our platform features precise control of system size, coupling strength, and isolation from the external world to explore the dynamics of equilibration and t…
When a physical system is put in contact with a very large thermal bath, it undergoes a dissipative (i.e., an apparently irreversible) process that leads to thermal equilibrium. This dynamical process can be described fully within quantum physics, involving only unitary, therefore reversible, maps. The information, initially present in the system, is not erased, but is diluted in the bath because of entanglement. Irreversibility may arise if, after quantum information has been thus diluted, some classical information is lost. This paper reviews a model for thermalization that displays these fe…
It is argued that setting isolated systems as primary scope of field theory and looking at particles as derived entities, the problem of an objective anchorage of quantum mechanics can be solved and irreversibility acquires a fundamental role. These general ideas are checked in the case of the Boltzmann description of a dilute gas.
We present a theory to describe thermalization mechanism for time-periodic finite isolated interacting quantum systems. The long time asymptote of natural observables in Floquet states is directly related to averages of these observables governed by a time-independent effective Hamiltonian. We prove that if the effective system is nonintegrable and satisfies eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, quantum states of such time-periodic isolated systems will thermalize. After a long time evolution, system will relax to a stationary state, which only depends on an initial energy of the effective Ham…
The approach to thermal equilibrium, or thermalization, in isolated quantum systems is among the most fundamental problems in statistical physics. Recent theoretical studies have revealed that thermalization in isolated quantum systems has several remarkable features, which emerge from quantum entanglement and are quite distinct from those in classical systems. Experimentally, well isolated and highly controllable ultracold quantum gases offer an ideal system to study the nonequilibrium dynamics in isolated quantum systems, triggering intensive recent theoretical endeavors on this fundamental …
Recently probabilistic hysteresis in isolated Hamiltonian systems of ultracold atoms has been studied in the limit of large particle numbers, where a semiclassical treatment is adequate. The origin of irreversibility in these sweep experiments, where a control parameter is slowly (adiabatically) tuned back and forth, turned out to be a passage blue back and forth across a separatrix (integrable case) or a passage in and out of a chaotic sea in phase space (chaotic case). Here we focus on the full quantum mechanical description of the integrable system and show how the semiclassical results eme…
The postulates of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) express that thermalization occurs due to the individual eigenstate of the system's Hamiltonian. But the ETH put no light on the dynamics that lead toward thermalization. In this paper, we observe the thermalization of a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) confined in an optical lattice potential that is embedded in the harmonic trap. Such optical lattice potential offers local friction to the oscillating BEC. The spread in the temporal density plot of BEC shows the thermalization of the BEC. Moreover, we observe that the presence of …
Statistical mechanics is founded on the assumption that all accessible configurations of a system are equally likely. This requires dynamics that explore all states over time, known as ergodic dynamics. In isolated quantum systems, however, the occurrence of ergodic behavior has remained an outstanding question. Here, we demonstrate ergodic dynamics in a small quantum system consisting of only three superconducting qubits. The qubits undergo a sequence of rotations and interactions and we measure the evolution of the density matrix. Maps of the entanglement entropy show that the full system ca…
Understanding how isolated quantum systems thermalize has recently gathered renewed interest almost 100 years after the first work by von Neumann, thanks to the experimental realizations of such systems. Experimental and numerical pieces of evidence imply that nonintegrability of the system plays an important role in thermalization. Nonintegrable systems that conserve energy alone are expected to be effectively described by the (micro)canonical ensemble due to the so-called eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the thermodynamic limit. In contrast, it is expected that stationary states…
We provide an overview of our numerical and analytical studies of isolated interacting quantum systems that are quenched out of equilibrium instantaneously. We describe the relaxation process to a new equilibrium and obtain lower bounds for the relaxation time of full random matrices and realistic systems with two-body interactions. We show that the size of the time fluctuations after relaxation decays exponentially with system size for systems without too many degeneracies. We also discuss the conditions for thermalization and demonstrate that it can happen after local and global quenches in …
Schrödinger's illustration of an imaginary cat in a box, neither alive nor dead, leads to a question of whether and how long a macroscopic quantum superposition can exist in various situations. It is well known that a macroscopic superposition is destroyed very quickly by environmental effects called decoherence. On the contrary, it is often believed that a macroscopic superposition continues to "survive" if it is ideally isolated from its environment. In this paper, using a well-established measure of macroscopic superpositions and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, we show that macros…
Understanding relaxation processes is an important unsolved problem in many areas of physics. A key challenge in studying such non-equilibrium dynamics is the scarcity of experimental tools for characterizing their complex transient states. We employ measurements of full quantum mechanical probability distributions of matter-wave interference to study the relaxation dynamics of a coherently split one-dimensional Bose gas and obtain unprecedented information about the dynamical states of the system. Following an initial rapid evolution, the full distributions reveal the approach towards a therm…
We study dynamics of entanglement in the thermalization process of an isolated quantum many-body system. We propose a simple setup for measuring the propagation speed of entanglement entropy (EE) in numerical simulations and apply it to the integrable/non-integrable spin models in 1D - the transverse Ising (TI) model, the chaotic Ising (CI) model, and the extended chaotic Ising (ECI) model. We find that two distinct time-scales $t^\ast$ and $t_{\rm {diff}}$ arise in the dynamics of EE in the thermalization process: the former represents the time-scale for the saturation of EE and the latter ch…
The concept of entropy is fundamental to thermalization, yet appears at odds with basic principles in quantum mechanics. Statistical mechanics relies on the maximization of entropy for a system at thermal equilibrium. However, an isolated many-body system initialized in a pure state will remain pure during Schrödinger evolution, and in this sense has static, zero entropy. The underlying role of quantum mechanics in many-body physics is then seemingly antithetical to the success of statistical mechanics in a large variety of systems. Here we experimentally study the emergence of statistical mec…
The recent discovery that for large Hilbert spaces, almost all (that is, typical) Hamiltonians have eigenstates that place small subsystems in thermal equilibrium, has shed much light on the origins of irreversibility and thermalization. Here we give numerical evidence that many-body lattice systems generically approach typicality as the number of subsystems is increased, and thus provide further support for the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Our results indicate that the deviation of many-body systems from typicality decreases exponentially with the number of systems. Further, by avera…
We investigate the time evolution of a generic and finite isolated quantum many-body system starting from a pure quantum state. We find the kinematical general canonical principle proposed by Popescu-Short-Winter for statistical mechanics can be built in a more solid ground by studying the thermalization, i.e. comparing the density matrices themselves rather than the measures of distances. In particular, this allows us to explicitly identify that, from any instantaneous pure state after thermalization, the state of subsystem is like from a microcanonical ensemble or a generalized Gibbs ensembl…
In this contribution we prove that the entropy of an N-body isolated system can not decrease and the entropy production should be non-negative provided the system possesses an equilibrium state. We define the entropy as a functional of the set of n-particle reduced density operators (n=0,....,N) generalizing the von Neumann fine-grained entropy formula. Additionally, as a consequence of our analysis we find the expression of the equilibrium n-particle reduced density operators which enter the definition of the entropy as well as the dissipated energy in an irreversible process.
If and how an isolated quantum system thermalizes despite its unitary time evolution is a long-standing, open problem of many-body physics. The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) postulates that thermalization happens at the level of individual eigenstates of a system's Hamiltonian. However, the ETH requires stringent conditions to be validated, and it does not address how the thermal state is reached dynamically from an inital non-equilibrium state. We consider a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) trapped in a double-well potential with an initial population imbalance. We find that the sy…
A profound quest of statistical mechanics is the origin of irreversibility - the arrow of time. New stimulants have been provided, thanks to unprecedented degree of control reached in experiments with isolated quantum systems and rapid theoretical developments of manybody localization in disordered interacting systems. The proposal of (many-body) eigenstate thermalization (ET) for these systems reinforces the common belief that either interaction or extrinsic randomness is required for thermalization. Here, we unveil a quantum thermalization mechanism challenging this belief. We find that, pro…
Experiments with trapped atomic gases have opened novel possibilities for studying the evolution of nonequilibrium finite quantum systems, which revived the necessity of reconsidering and developing the theory of such processes. This review analyzes the basic approaches to describing the phenomena of equilibration, thermalization, and decoherence in finite quantum systems. Isolated, nonisolated, and quasi-isolated quantum systems are considered. The relations between equilibration, decoherence, and the existence of time arrow are emphasized. The possibility for the occurrence of rare events, p…
A generalization of the Gibbs-von Neumann relative entropy is proposed based on the quantum BBGKY [Bogolyubov-Born-Green-Kirkwood-Yvon] hierarchy as the nonequilibrium entropy for an N-body system. By using a generalization of the Liouville-von Neumann equation describing the evolution of a density super- operator, it is demonstrated that the entropy production for an isolated system is non-negative, which provides an arrow of time. Moreover, following the procedure of non-equilibrium thermodynamics a master matrix is introduced for which a mi- croscopic expression is obtained. Then, the quant…
Fast nonadiabatic control protocols known as shortcuts to adiabaticity have found a plethora of applications, but their use has been severely limited to speeding up the dynamics of isolated quantum systems. We introduce shortcuts for open quantum processes that make possible the fast control of Gaussian states in non-unitary processes. Specifically, we provide the time modulation of the trap frequency and dephasing strength that allow preparing an arbitrary thermal state in a finite time. Experimental implementation can be done via stochastic parametric driving or continuous measurements, read…
Based on the view that thermal equilibrium should be characterized through macroscopic observations, we develop a general theory about typicality of thermal equilibrium and the approach to thermal equilibrium in macroscopic quantum systems. We first formulate the notion that a pure state in an isolated quantum system represents thermal equilibrium. Then by assuming, or proving in certain classes of nontrivial models (including that of two bodies in thermal contact), large-deviation type bounds (which we call thermodynamic bounds) for the microcanonical ensemble, we prove that to represent ther…
Prethermalization has been extensively studied in systems close to integrability. We propose a more general, yet conceptually simpler, setup for this phenomenon. We consider a---possibly nonintegrable---reference dynamics, weakly perturbed so that the perturbation breaks at least one conservation law of the reference dynamics. We argue then that the evolution of the system proceeds via intermediate (generalized) equilibrium states of the reference dynamics. The motion on the manifold of equilibrium states is governed by an autonomous equation, flowing towards global equilibrium in a time of or…
Conventional wisdom suggests that the long time behavior of isolated interacting periodically driven (Floquet) systems is a featureless maximal entropy state characterized by an infinite temperature. Efforts to thwart this uninteresting fixed point include adding sufficient disorder to realize a Floquet many-body localized phase or working in a narrow region of drive frequencies to achieve glassy non-thermal behavior at long time. Here we show that in clean systems the Floquet eigenstates can exhibit non-thermal behavior due to finite system size. We consider a one-dimensional system of spinle…
A large class of isolated quantum system in a pure state can equilibrate and serve as a heat bath. We show that once the equilibrium is reached, any of its subsystems that is much smaller than the isolated system is thermalized such that the subsystem is governed by the Gibbs distribution. Within this theoretical framework, the celebrated superposition principle of quantum mechanics leads to a prediction of a thermalized subsystem with multiple temperatures when the isolated system is in a superposition state of energy eigenstates of multiple distinct energy scales. This multiple-temperature s…
Dynamics of large complex systems, such as relaxation towards equilibrium in classical statistical mechanics, often obeys a master equation. The equation significantly simplifies the complexities but describes essential information of occupation probabilities. A related fundamental question is the thermalization, a coherent evolution of an isolated many-body quantum state into a state that seems to be in thermal equilibrium. It is valuable to find an effective equation describing this complex dynamics. Here, we experimentally investigate the question by observing sudden quench dynamics of quan…
The Bolztmann echo (BE) is a measure of irreversibility and sensitivity to perturbations for non-isolated systems. Recently, different regimes of this quantity were described for chaotic systems. There is a perturbative regime where the BE decays with a rate given by the sum of a term depending on the accuracy with which the system is time-reversed and a term depending on the coupling between the system and the environment. In addition, a parameter independent regime, characterised by the classical Lyapunov exponent, is expected. In this paper we study the behaviour of the BE in hyperbolic map…
The question of how irreversibility can emerge as a generic phenomena when the underlying mechanical theory is reversible has been a long-standing fundamental problem for both classical and quantum mechanics. We describe a mechanism for the appearance of irreversibility that applies to coherent, isolated systems in a pure quantum state. This equilibration mechanism requires only an assumption of sufficiently complex internal dynamics and natural information-theoretic constraints arising from the infeasibility of collecting an astronomical amount of measurement data. Remarkably, we are able to …
Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this arrow of time is associated with a positive mean entropy production. Using a nuclear magnetic resonance setup, we measure the nonequilibrium entropy produced in an isolated spin-1/2 system following fast quenches of an external magnetic field and experimentally demonstrate that it is equal to the entropic distance, expressed by the Kullback-Leibler divergen…
We model an isolated quantum computer as a two-dimensional lattice of qubits (spin halves) with fluctuations in individual qubit energies and residual short-range inter-qubit couplings. In the limit when fluctuations and couplings are small compared to the one-qubit energy spacing, the spectrum has a band structure and we study the quantum computer core (central band) with the highest density of states. Above a critical inter-qubit coupling strength, quantum chaos sets in, leading to quantum ergodicity of eigenstates in an isolated quantum computer. The onset of chaos results in the interactio…
The last decade has witnessed the remarkable progress in our understanding of thermalization in isolated quantum systems. Combining the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis with quantum measurement theory, we extend the framework of quantum thermalization to open many-body systems. A generic many-body system subject to continuous observation is shown to thermalize at a single trajectory level. We show that the nonunitary nature of quantum measurement causes several unique thermalization mechanisms that are unseen in isolated systems. We present numerical evidence for our findings by applying o…
We explore the origin of the arrow of time in an isolated quantum system described by the Schroedinger equation. We provide an explanation from weak values in the configuration space, which are understood as operational properties obtained in the laboratory following a well-defined protocol. We show that quantum systems satisfying the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis can simultaneously provide thermalized ensemble expectation values and nonthermalized weak values of the momentum, both from the same operational probability distribution. The reason why weak values of the momentum may escape …
TU Dresden, Institute of Theoretical Physics and Center for Dynamics（德累斯顿工业大学理论物理研究所与动力学中心）；Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems（马克斯·普朗克复杂系统物理研究所）
Equilibration and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis as limits to observing macroscopic quantum superpositions
Escola Politécnica de Pernambuco, Universidade de Pernambuco（伯南布哥联邦大学应用理工学院）；Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz（圣克鲁斯州立大学）；Instituto de Física, Universidade Federal Fluminense（弗鲁米嫩塞联邦大学物理研究所）
Exactly solvable models that exhibit quantum signatures of classical chaos are both rare as well as important - more so in view of the fact that the mechanisms for ergodic behavior and thermalization in isolated quantum systems and its connections to non-integrability are under active investigation. In this work, we study quantum systems of few qubits collectively modeled as a kicked top, a textbook example of quantum chaos. In particular, we show that the 3 and 4 qubit cases are exactly solvable and yet, interestingly, can display signatures of ergodicity and thermalization. Deriving analytic…
The evolution of a quasi-isolated finite quantum system from a nonequilibrium initial state is considered. The condition of quasi-isolation allows for the description of the system dynamics on the general basis, without specifying the system details and for arbitrary initial conditions. The influence of surrounding results in (at least partial) equilibration and decoherence. The resulting equilibrium state bears information on initial conditions and is characterized by a representative ensemble. It is shown that the system average information with time does not increase. The partial equilibrat…
The emergence of statistical mechanics for isolated classical systems comes about through chaotic dynamics and ergodicity. Here we review how similar questions can be answered in quantum systems. The crucial point is that individual energy eigenstates behave in many ways like a statistical ensemble. A more detailed statement of this is named the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH). The reasons for why it works in so many cases are rooted in the early work of Wigner on random matrix theory and our understanding of quantum chaos. The ETH has now been studied extensively by both analytic a…
