Thermalization and ergodicity in many-body open quantum systems

Understand

We study thermalization in many-body quantum systems locally coupled to an external bath.

• It is shown that quantum chaotic systems do thermalize, that is, they exhibit relaxation to an invariant ergodic state which, in the bulk, is well approximated by the grand canonical state.
• Moreover, the resulting ergodic state in the bulk does not depend on the details of the baths.
• On the other hand, for integrable systems the invariant state does depend on the bath and is different from the grand canonical state.