Abstract
We detail the experimental observation of the non-equilibrium many-body phenomenon prethermalization. We study the dynamics of a rapidly and coherently split one-dimensional Bose gas. An analysis based on the use of full quantum mechanical probability distributions of matter wave interference contrast reveals that the system evolves toward a quasi-steady state. This state, which can be characterized by an effective temperature, is not the final thermal equilibrium state. We compare the evolution of the system to an integrable Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid model, and show that the system dephases to a prethermalized state rather than undergoing thermalization toward a final thermal equilibrium state.
Highlights
We detail the experimental observation of the non-equilibrium many-body phenomenon prethermalization
We point out that for the present experiment, even independent of our theoretical model, the observed clear difference between the full quantum mechanical probability distribution functions (FDFs) of normalized squared contrast obtained for an equilibrium system formed by cooling in the double well and the FDFs observed after dynamic splitting provides direct experimental evidence that no thermalization is observed in our experiment
We have detailed the experimental observation of the non-equilibrium many-body phenomenon of prethermalization
Summary
The experimental study is performed using trapped 1D Bose gases. Such systems offer two unique advantages for non-equilibrium experiments. In this regime, density fluctuations are strongly suppressed and the gas is characterized by strong phase fluctuations. The aim of our study is to probe how these initially almost perfect correlations of the relative phase become obscured over time and if the thermal equilibrium state corresponding to two completely independent gases is reached [32, 33]. To this end, the two gases are allowed to evolve in the double-well potential for a varying evolution time te before the relative phase correlations are probed via time-offlight matter wave interference (figure 1(c)). Example interference patterns after various evolution times, demonstrating the loss of the initial phase coherence, are shown in figure 1
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