Prethermalization in an open quantum system coupled to a spatially correlated bosonic bath

Abstract

A nearly-integrable isolated quantum many-body system reaches a quasi-stationary prethermal state before a late thermalization. Here, we revisit a particular example in the settings of an open quantum system (OQS). We consider a collection of non-interacting atoms coupled to a spatially correlated bosonic bath characterized by a bath correlation length. Our result implies that the integrability of the system depends on such a correlation length. If this length is much larger than the distance between the atoms, such a system behaves as a nearly-integrable OQS. We study the properties of the emerging prethermal state for this case, i.e. the state’s lifetime, the extensive number of existing quasi-conserved quantities, the emergence of the generalized Gibbs state, and the scaling of von Neumann entropy, etc. We find that for the prethermal state, the maximum growth of entropy is logarithmic with the number of atoms, whereas such growth is linear for the final steady state, which is the Gibbs state in this case. Finally, we discuss how such prethermal states can have significant applications in quantum entanglement storage devices.