2022/03/22 by Ran Yaacoby, Oren Raz, Yaacoby, Ran +3 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum many-body systems #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #Theoretical and Computational Physics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.11644
openalex publication_date 2022/03/22 · openalex created_date 2022/05/05 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
It is commonly assumed that a large system, weakly coupled to a thermal environment through its boundaries, relaxes quasistatically towards the new equilibrium even when the temperature of the environment changes abruptly. Here we show how this intuitive picture can break down for discrete energy systems, even in the case of infinitely weak coupling. We provide an example in the Ising chain, showing how the interaction among degrees of freedom can create corrugated energy landscapes that are responsible for far-from-equilibrium and allow anomalous relaxation effects to survive infinitely weak couplings.