Speaker
Peter Reimann
(Bielefeld)
Description
Lack of knowledge about the detailed many-particle motion on
the microscopic scale is a key issue in any theoretical
description of a macroscopic experiment. For systems at or
close to thermal equilibrium, statistical mechanics provides
a very successful general framework to cope with this
problem. Far from equilibrium, only very few quantitative
and comparably universal results are known. Here, a new
quantum mechanical prediction of this type is derived and
verified against various experimental and numerical data
from the literature. It quantitatively describes the entire
temporal relaxation towards thermal equilibrium for a large
class (in a mathematically precisely defined sense) of
closed many-body systems, whose initial state may be
arbitrarily far from equilibrium.
Primary author
Peter Reimann
(Bielefeld)
