Universal energy fluctuations in thermally isolated driven systems

Understand

When an isolated system is brought in contact with a heat bath its final energy is random and follows the Gibbs distribution -- a cornerstone of statistical physics.

• The system's energy can also be changed by performing non-adiabatic work using a cyclic process.
• Almost nothing is known about the resulting energy distribution in this setup, which is especially relevant to recent experimental progress in cold atoms, ions traps, superconducting qubits and other systems.
• Here we show that when the non-adiabatic process comprises of many repeated cyclic processes the resulting energy distribution is universal and different from the Gibbs ensemble.