2010/08/31 by Amy C. Cassidy, Charles W. Clark, Marcos Rigol · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.106.140405
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 140405 (2011) · 8 pages, 9 figures, as published
arxiv created 2011/04/15 · arxiv updated 2011/04/18
After a quench, observables in an integrable system may not relax to the standard thermal values, but can relax to the ones predicted by the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) [M. Rigol et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 050405 (2007)]. The GGE has been shown to accurately describe observables in various one-dimensional integrable systems, but the origin of its success is not fully understood. Here we introduce a microcanonical version of the GGE and provide a justification of the GGE based on a generalized interpretation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, which was previously introduced to explain thermalization of nonintegrable systems. We study relaxation after a quench of one-dimensional hard-core bosons in an optical lattice. Exact numerical calculations for up to 10 particles on 50 lattice sites (~1010 eigenstates) validate our approach.