Quantum quenches in disordered systems: Approach to thermal equilibrium without a typical relaxation time

Ehsan Khatami; Marcos Rigol; Armando Relaño; Antonio M. Garcia-Garcia

doi:10.1103/physreve.85.050102

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arXiv · 1103.0787

Quantum quenches in disordered systems: Approach to thermal equilibrium without a typical relaxation time

Ehsan Khatami·Marcos Rigol·Armando Relaño·Antonio M. Garcia-Garcia

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Abstract

We study spectral properties and the dynamics after a quench of one-dimensional spinless fermions with short-range interactions and long-range random hopping. We show that a sufficiently fast decay of the hopping term promotes localization effects at finite temperature, which prevents thermalization even if the classical motion is chaotic. For slower decays, we find that thermalization does occur. However, within this model, the latter regime falls in an unexpected universality class, namely, observables exhibit a power-law (as opposed to an exponential) approach to their thermal expectation values.

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cond-mat.dis-nn cond-mat.quant-gas cond-mat.stat-mech quant-ph

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Ehsan Khatami, Marcos Rigol, Armando Relaño, Antonio M. Garcia-Garcia. 2012-05-22. Quantum quenches in disordered systems: Approach to thermal equilibrium without a typical relaxation time. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.85.050102

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