2006/04/30 by Marcos Rigol, Vanja Dunjko, Vladimir Yurovsky +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.other #cond-mat.quant-gas #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.98.050405
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 050405 (2007) · 4 pages, 2 figures, published version
arxiv created 2007/02/02 · arxiv updated 2017/09/11
In this Letter we pose the question of whether a many-body quantum system with a full set of conserved quantities can relax to an equilibrium state, and, if it can, what the properties of such state are. We confirm the relaxation hypothesis through a thorough ab initio numerical investigation of the dynamics of hard-core bosons on a one-dimensional lattice. Further, a natural extension of the Gibbs ensemble to integrable systems results in a theory that is able to predict the mean values of physical observables after relaxation. Finally, we show that our generalized equilibrium carries more memory of the initial conditions than the usual thermodynamic one. This effect may have many experimental consequences, some of which having already been observed in the recent experiment on the non-equilibrium dynamics of one-dimensional hard-core bosons in a harmonic potential [T. Kinoshita, T. Wenger, D. S. Weiss, Nature (London) 440, 900 (2006)].