Quantum Thermalization With Couplings

H. Dong, S. Yang, X. F. Liu, C. P. Sun

Published 2007-02-04, updated 2007-03-28Version 2

We study the role of the system-bath coupling for the generalized canonical thermalization [S. Popescu, et al., Nature Physics 2,754(2006) and S. Goldstein et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 050403(2006)] that reduces almost all the pure states of the "universe" [formed by a system S plus its surrounding heat bath $B$] to a canonical equilibrium state of S. We present an exactly solvable, but universal model for this kinematic thermalization with an explicit consideration about the energy shell deformation due to the interaction between S and B. By calculating the state numbers of the "universe" and its subsystems S and B in various deformed energy shells, it is found that, for the overwhelming majority of the "universe" states (they are entangled at least), the diagonal canonical typicality remains robust with respect to finite interactions between S and B. Particularly, the kinematic decoherence is utilized here to account for the vanishing of the off-diagonal elements of the reduced density matrix of S. It is pointed out that the non-vanishing off-diagonal elements due to the finiteness of bath and the stronger system-bath interaction might offer more novelties of the quantum thermalization.