Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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TT: Fachverband Tiefe Temperaturen

TT 29: Focus Session: Dynamics in Many-Body Systems: Equilibration and Localization (joint session TT/DY)

TT 29.7: Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 12:30–12:45, H 0104

Typicality of Eigenstate Thermalization — •Peter Reimann — Theoretische Physik, Universität Bielefeld, Germany

Thermalization, i.e., the relaxation of a macroscopic system towards thermal equilibrium, is a very common and well-established experimental fact, but has still not been satisfacorily explained in terms of the basic laws of physics. Specifically, for isolated many-body systems, the so-called eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) has recently attracted much interest as a sufficient condition from which thermalization could be deduced. Here, this hypothesis is validated as a typicality property for the textbook example of a simple gas in a box: admitting some tiny uncertainty about the “true” value of a single model parameter, e.g. the particle interaction strength, ETH and thus thermalization are warranted for the overwheling majority of those slightly differing model parameter values.