Some speculations about local thermalization of nonequilibrium extended quantum systems

Some Speculations About "The Great Nicaraguan Lake"

Thermalization of field driven quantum systems

There is much interest in how quantum systems thermalize after a sudden change, because unitary evolution should preclude thermalization. The eigenstate thermalization hypothesis resolves this because all observables for quantum states in a small energy window have essentially the same value; it is violated for integrable systems due to the infinite number of conserved quantities. Here, we show...

Thermalization of quantum systems by finite baths

– We consider a discrete quantum system coupled to a finite bath, which may consist of only one particle, in contrast to the standard baths which usually consist of continua of oscillators, spins, etc. We find that such finite baths may nevertheless equilibrate the system though not necessarily in the way predicted by standard open system techniques. This behavior results regardless of the init...

On some speculations about the state reductions of photons

The spontaneous collapses of the wave functions of photons, within the framework of possible relativistic extensions of the theory of Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber are discussed. It is shown that a recently published argument which claims that such collapses can account for the emergence of determinate outcomes of certain experiments involving fluorescent screens is inadequate, since it is based ...

Some Speculations about Black Hole Entropy in String Theory

The classical Bekenstein entropy of a black hole is argued to arise from configurations of strings with ends which are frozen on the horizon. Quantum corrections to this entropy are probably finite unlike the case in quantum field theory. Finally it is speculated that all black holes are single string states. The level density of strings is of the right order of magnitude to reproduce the Beken...