Thermal contact: mischief and time scales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We discuss what kind of quantum dynamics can yield thermalization. We show that any temperature measurement protocol must be sensitive to the system’s local energy scale, not just its state. Specifically, we illustrate this by showing that any temperature measurement protocol that does not resolve the system’s local Hamiltonian (such as, e.g. full state tomography) is susceptible to being fooled into measuring any value for the temperature. Since placing a system in thermal contact with a reference system at a known temperature is a way of measuring temperature, any robust notion of thermal contact must be resistant to this ‘attack’. This provides us with a necessary conditions for thermal contact between quantum systems. We then apply this condition to a scenario where one expects to find thermalization: a system repeatedly interacting with the microconstitutents of a thermal reservoir. We show such models of thermalization cannot be correct without fine-tuning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".