Typical fast thermalization processes in closed many-body systems

Understand

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.
• Far from equilibrium, only very few quantitative and comparably universal results are known.
• Here, a new quantum mechanical prediction of this type is derived and verified against various experimental and numerical data from the literature.