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Condensed Matter Theory: 

Thouless and Relaxation Timescales in Many-Body Quantum Systems

 

Lea Santos 

Yeshiva University

 

Using experimental observables and realistic models, we found that there is not only one, but two very long timescales involved in the relaxation process of many-body quantum systems: the Thouless time and the relaxation time. The Thouless time refers to the point beyond which the dynamics acquire universal features and relaxation happens when the evolution reaches a stationary state. Since the initial many-body state spreads over an exponentially large many-body Hilbert space, both times increase exponentially with system size. We show that in chaotic systems, the Thouless time is smaller than the relaxation time, while for systems approaching a many-body localized phase, they merge together. Our results for the realistic chaotic models are compared with those for random matrices, which corroborates their generality.

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