2016/03/01 by Peter Reimann · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Artificial intelligence #Class (philosophy) #Classical mechanics #Computer science #Particle system #Physics #Quantum #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Relaxation (psychology) #Scale (ratio) #Spectroscopy and Quantum Chemical Studies #Statistical mechanics #Statistical physics #Thermal #Thermal equilibrium #Thermalisation #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/ncomms10821
published as Nat. Commun. 7, 10821 (2016)
openalex publication_date 2016/03/01 · arxiv created 2016/03/02 · arxiv updated 2016/03/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The lack of knowledge about the detailed many-particle motion on the microscopic scale is a key issue in any theoretical description of a macroscopic experiment. For systems at or close to thermal equilibrium, statistical mechanics provides a very successful general framework to cope with this problem. However, far from equilibrium, only very few quantitative and comparably universal results are known. Here a quantum mechanical prediction of this type is derived and verified against various experimental and numerical data from the literature. It quantitatively describes the entire temporal relaxation towards thermal equilibrium for a large class (in a mathematically precisely defined sense) of closed many-body systems, whose initial state may be arbitrarily far from equilibrium.