Affiliation:
1. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Abstract
To thermalize, or not to thermalize?
Intuition tells us that an isolated physical system subjected to a sudden change (i.e., quenching) will evolve in a way that maximizes its entropy. If the system is in a pure, zero-entropy quantum state, it is expected to remain so even after quenching. How do we then reconcile statistical mechanics with quantum laws? To address this question, Kaufman
et al.
used their quantum microscope to study strings of six rubidium atoms confined in the wells of an optical lattice (see the Perspective by Polkovnikov and Sels). When tunneling along the strings was suddenly switched on, the strings as a whole remained in a pure state, but smaller subsets of two or three atoms conformed to a thermal distribution. The force driving the thermalization was quantum entanglement.
Science
, this issue p.
794
; see also p.
752
Funder
NSF
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
Air Force Office of Scientific Research
Army Research Office
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Reference46 articles.
1. J. J. Sakurai Modern Quantum Mechanics (Addison Wesley Longman 1993).
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3. Entanglement in many-body systems
4. Measuring Entanglement Growth in Quench Dynamics of Bosons in an Optical Lattice
5. Entanglement growth in quench dynamics with variable range interactions;Schachenmayer J.;Phys. Rev. X,2013
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