Irreversible dynamics in quantum many-body systems

Irreversibility, despite being a necessary condition for thermalization, still lacks a sound understanding in the context of quantum many-body systems. In our work [1] 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.

[1] M. Schmitt and S. Kehrein, arXiv:1711.00015