Abstract
An isolated quantum system often shows relaxation to a quasi-stationary state before reaching thermal equilibrium. Such a pre-thermalized state was observed in recent experiments in a one-dimensional Bose gas after it had been coherently split into two. Although the existence of local conserved quantities is usually considered to be the key ingredient of pre-thermalization, the question of whether non-local correlations between the subsystems can influence pre-thermalization of the entire system has remained unanswered. Here we study the dynamics of coherently split one-dimensional Bose gases and find that the initial entanglement combined with energy degeneracy due to parity and translation invariance strongly affects the long-term behaviour of the system. The mechanism of this entanglement pre-thermalization is quite general and not restricted to one-dimensional Bose gases. In view of recent experiments with a small and well-defined number of ultracold atoms, our predictions based on exact few-body calculations could be tested in experiments.
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Acknowledgements
We thank T. Deguchi, S. Furukawa and N. Sakumichi for discussions. This work was supported by KAKENHI Grant No. 26287088 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas ‘Topological Materials Science’ (KAKENHI Grant No. 15H05855), the Photon Frontier Network Program from MEXT of Japan, and the Mitsubishi Foundation. E.K. acknowledges support from the Institute for Photon Science and Technology. T.M. acknowledges the JSPS Core-to-Core Program ‘Non-equilibrium dynamics of soft matter and information’ for financial support. T.N.I. acknowledges the JSPS for financial support (Grant No. 248408) and Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research Abroad.
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Kaminishi, E., Mori, T., Ikeda, T. et al. Entanglement pre-thermalization in a one-dimensional Bose gas. Nature Phys 11, 1050–1056 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3478
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3478
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