Irreversible dynamics in quantum many-body systems

Markus Schmitt, Stefan Kehrein

Published 2017-10-31Version 1

Irreversibility, despite being a necessary condition for thermalization, still lacks a sound understanding in the context of quantum many-body systems. In this work we approach this question by studying the behavior of generic many-body systems under imperfect effective time reversal, where the imperfection is introduced as a perturbation of the many-body state at the point of time reversal. Based on numerical simulations of the full quantum dynamics we demonstrate that observable echos occurring in this setting decay exponentially with a rate that is intrinsic to the system meaning that the dynamics is effectively irreversible.