On the difference between thermalization in open and isolated quantum systems: A case study
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thermalization of isolated and open quantum systems has been studied extensively. However, being the subject of investigation by different scientific communities and being analysed using different mathematical tools, the connection between the isolated (IQS) and open (OQS) approaches to thermalization has remained opaque. Here we demonstrate that the fundamental difference between the two paradigms is the order in which the long time and the thermodynamic limits are taken. This difference implies that they describe physics on widely different time and length scales. Our analysis is carried out numerically for the case of a double quantum dot (DQD) coupled to a fermionic lead, also known as the interacting resonant level model in quantum impurity physics. We show how both OQS and IQS thermalization can be explored in this model on equal footing, allowing a fair comparison between the two. We find that while the quadratically coupled (free) DQD experiences no isolated thermalization, it of course does experience open thermalization. For the non-linearly interacting DQD coupled to a fermionic lead, the many-body interaction in the DQD breaks the integrability of the whole system. We find that this system shows strong evidence of both OQS and IQS thermalization in the same dynamics, but at widely different time scales, consistent with reversing the order of the long time and the thermodynamic limits.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it