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arXiv · 2206.00704

Emergence of Fermi's Golden Rule

Abstract

Fermi's Golden Rule (FGR) applies in the limit where an initial quantum state is weakly coupled to a {\it continuum} of other final states overlapping its energy. Here we investigate what happens away from this limit, where the set of final states is discrete, with a nonzero mean level spacing; this question arises in a number of recently investigated many-body systems. For different symmetry classes, we analytically and/or numerically calculate the universal crossovers in the average decay of the initial state as the level spacing is varied, with the Golden Rule emerging in the limit of a continuum. Among the corrections to the exponential decay of the initial state given by FGR is the appearance of the spectral form factor in the long-time regime for small but nonzero level spacing.

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Tobias Micklitz, Alan Morningstar, Alexander Altland, David A. Huse. 2022-06-01. Emergence of Fermi's Golden Rule. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.129.140402

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