Condensed Matter Physics, 2023, vol. 26, No. 1, 13502
DOI:10.5488/CMP.26.13502           arXiv:2303.01881

Title: Some speculations about local thermalization of nonequilibrium extended quantum systems
Author(s):
  M. Coppola (Université de Lorraine, CNRS, LPCT, F-54000 Nancy, France),
  D. Karevski (Université de Lorraine, CNRS, LPCT, F-54000 Nancy, France)

We discuss the possibility of defining an emergent local temperature in extended quantum many-body systems evolving out of equilibrium. For the most simple case of free-fermionic systems, we give an explicit formula for the effective temperature in the case of, not necessarily unitary, Gaussian preserving dynamics. In this framework, we consider the hopping fermions on a one-dimensional lattice submitted to randomly distributed projective measurements of the local occupation numbers. We show from the average over many quantum trajectories that the effective temperature relaxes exponentially towards infinity.

Key words: quantum statistical mechanics, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, open quantum systems


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