Quantum Many-Body Mpemba Effect through Resonances

Abstract

Relaxation towards equilibrium is often assumed to be slower when a system starts farther from equilibrium, but this intuition fails in the Mpemba effect. Recent advances in controllable quantum platforms have enabled the exploration of its quantum analogue, the quantum Mpemba effect (QME), yet its microscopic origin remains largely unclear. Here we provide a general framework for understanding the QME in closed quantum many-body chaotic systems by reformulating the equilibration process of local subsystems in terms of Ruelle-Pollicott (RP) resonances. We show that suppressing the initial-state overlap with the dominant RP resonant mode accelerates subsystem equilibration and thereby yields the QME. We further uncover that a novel type of strong QME can occur via complete translation-symmetry breaking of initial states. We substantiate our predictions using the prototypical kicked Ising chain and exotic yet experimentally relevant initial states inspired by number theory. These findings cast the QME in closed many-body systems into a unified framework with open-system analogues and provide experimentally accessible signatures on state-of-the-art quantum platforms.