Physics Seminar

“Entanglement and thermalization in many-body systems: recent progress”

박채연 박사

아태이론물리센터

April 6 (Fri.), 10:00 AM

#2502, E6

Understanding dynamics of quantum many-body systems is one of the fundamental challenges in physics. This challenge is related to a diversity of questions involving the history of our universe and complex dynamics of chemical objects. Among various interesting problems, thermalization attracted a lot of attention recently as it explains how macroscopic thermodynamics emerges from microscopic quantum mechanics. Even though numerous experimental and numerical results have shown that thermalization occurs in usual many-body systems, general explanation for thermalization is still lacking. Several different mechanisms have been suggested, but none of them is universal. In this talk, we first briefly review some details of those mechanisms and discuss how they are different in practice. To be specific, we examine how entanglement/correlations of energy eigenstates and thermalization timescales differ in eigenstate thermalization hypothesis and local equilibration theory. Typicality arguments and random matrix theory also will be discussed as they provide insight into thermalization dynamics. 

Contact: Dr. Hyosub Kim, Physics Dept., (kkhhggg@kaist.ac.kr)