Prof. Pasquale Calabrese (SISSA – International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy), ERC grant recipient, was our guest at IPB colloquium on Friday, 29 December 2017. The talk was entitled:
“Entanglement and thermodynamics in non-equilibrium isolated quantum systems”
Abstract of the talk:
Entanglement and entropy are key concepts standing at the foundations of quantum and statistical mechanics. In the last decade the study of the non-equilibrium dynamics of isolated quantum systems revealed that these two concepts are intricately intertwined. Although the unitary time evolution ensuing from a pure initial state maintains the system globally at zero entropy, at long time after the quench local properties are captured by an appropriate statistical ensemble with non-zero thermodynamic entropy, which can be interpreted as the entanglement accumulated during the dynamics. Therefore, understanding the post-quench entanglement evolution unveils how thermodynamics emerges in isolated quantum systems.