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Emergent thermodynamics in a quenched quantum many-body system
1Blackett Laboratory, Department of Physics, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
We study the statistics of the work done, fluctuation relations, and irreversible entropy production in a quantum many-body system subject to the sudden quench of a control parameter. By treating the quench as a thermodynamic transformation we show that the emergence of irreversibility in the nonequilibrium dynamics of closed many-body quantum systems can be accurately characterized. We demonstrate our ideas by considering a transverse quantum Ising model that is taken out of equilibrium by an instantaneous change of the transverse field.
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