Prethermalization revealed by the relaxation dynamics of full distribution functions

Abstract

The dynamics and prethermalization of one-dimensional quantum systems probed through the full distributions of quantum noise Takuya Kitagawa, Adilet Imambekov, Jörg Schmiedmayer et al. Abstract. We detail the experimental observation of the non-equilibrium many-body phenomenon prethermalization. We study the dynamics of a rapidly and coherently split one-dimensional Bose gas. An analysis based on the use of full quantum mechanical probability distributions of matter wave interference contrast reveals that the system evolves toward a quasi-steady state. This state, which can be characterized by an effective temperature, is not the final thermal equilibrium state. We compare the evolution of the system to an integrable Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid model, and show that the system dephases to a prethermalized state rather than undergoing thermalization toward a final thermal equilibrium state.

Nonequilibrium universality in the heating dynamics of interacting Luttinger liquids

“…qmax qmin ≈ 5.7. The initial temperatures used here are in reach for current experiments [17,54], holding the promise to resolve the discussed nonequilibrium scaling regime in the lab. We finally note that while the different scaling regimes may not be very clearly visible in Fig.…”

Experimental characterization of a quantum many-body system via higher-order correlations

“…To extract the spatially resolved relative phase between the superfluids we record the resulting matterwave interference pattern of the two 1D Bose gases after about 16 ms time-of-flight expansion using standard absorption imaging [23,30].…”

Prethermalization and thermalization of a quenched interacting Luttinger liquid

“…Concerning the relevance of the interacting Luttinger model, before closing the section, we would like to mention that only recently pioneering experiments in ultra-cold gases both in and out of equilibrium explored the transient and prethermalization dynamics of systems [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][68][69][70] effectively described by a quadratic Luttinger model, the bosonic theory of the Hamiltonian in Eq. (2.2).…”