Relaxation of Multitime Statistics in Quantum Systems


Abstract in English

Thermodynamics is a theory of equilibrium transformations, but quantum dynamics are inherently out-of-equilibrium. It remains an open problem to show how the two theories are consistent with each other. Here we extend the ideas of pure state quantum statistical mechanics to show the equilibration of isolated quantum processes; that most multitime observables cannot distinguish a nonequilibrium process from an equilibrium one, unless the system is probed for an extremely large number of times. A surprising corollary of our results is that the size of non-Markovianity and other characteristics of the nonequilibrium process are bounded by that of the equilibrium process.

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