Theoretical study on thermalization in isolated quantum systems

Understand

Understanding how isolated quantum systems thermalize has recently gathered renewed interest almost 100 years after the first work by von Neumann, thanks to the experimental realizations of such systems.

• Experimental and numerical pieces of evidence imply that nonintegrability of the system plays an important role in thermalization.
• Nonintegrable systems that conserve energy alone are expected to be effectively described by the (micro)canonical ensemble due to the so-called eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the thermodynamic limit.
• In contrast, it is expected that stationary states in integrable systems are described not by the canonical ensemble but by the generalized Gibbs ensemble (GGE) due to the existence of many nontrivial conserved quantities.