Hannover 2016 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 41: Quantum Effects: Entanglement and Decoherence II
Q 41.6: Talk
Wednesday, March 2, 2016, 16:00–16:15, f442
Time-resolved observation of thermalization in an isolated quantum system — •Govinda Clos1, Diego Porras2, Ulrich Warring1, and Tobias Schaetz1 — 1Physikalisches Institut, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Hermann-Herder-Straße 3, 79104 Freiburg, Germany — 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, United Kingdom
How can thermalization occur in an isolated quantum system? Unitary time evolution does not permit the total system to reach a thermal state. However, for a strongly interacting system with many degrees of freedom, expectation values of local observables can come to agreement with microcanonical predictions. This behaviour is described within a conjecture called Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis [1].
Using a near-perfectly isolated trapped-ion system, we experimentally study the evolution of a single spin in a Hilbert space of dimension up to 222 by controlling its coupling to a discrete bosonic environment [2]. Varying the effective size of the system, we measure the dynamics of spin observables and determine its time average and fluctuations to study the onset of thermalization [3].
[1] Eisert et al., Nature Physics 11, 124 (2015).
[2] Porras et al., Physical Review A 78, 010101 (2008).
[3] Clos et al., arXiv:1509.07712 (2015).