2019/08/01 by Axel Cortés Cubero, Cubero, Axel Cortés, Neil J. Robinson +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions #Quantum many-body systems #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1908.00270
openalex publication_date 2019/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Motivated by recent works aimed at understanding the status of equilibration and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in theories with confinement, we return to the 't Hooft model, the large-Nc limit of (1+1)-d quantum chromodynamics. This limit has been studied extensively since its inception in the mid-1970s, with various exact results being known, such as the quark and meson propagators, the quark-antiquark interaction vertex, and the meson decay amplitude. We then argue this model is an ideal laboratory to study non-equilibrium phenomena, since it is manifestly non-integrable, yet one retains a high level of analytic control through large-Nc diagrammatics. We first elucidate what are the non-equilibrium manifestations of the phenomenon of large-Nc volume independence. We then find that within the confined phase, there is a class of initial states that lead to a violation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, i.e. the system never thermalizes. This is due to the existence of heavy mesons with an extensive amount of energy, a phenomenon that has been numerically observed recently in the quantum Ising chain.