Lea Santos (Yeshiva University, USA): Time scales for the equilibration of many-body quantum systems

While there is consensus on what equilibration and thermalization mean in isolated many-body quantum systems, it is not yet clear how long they take to reach equilibrium. We show that in the chaotic regime, if dynamical manifestations of spectral correlations in the form of the correlation hole (ramp) are taken into account, the time for thermalization scales exponentially with system size, while if they are neglected, the scaling is better described by a power law with system size, though with an exponent larger than expected for diffusive transport. In systems with onsite disorder, we also show that as the disorder strength increases and the system approaches a localized phase, the Thouless time grows exponentially with the disorder strength and approaches the value of the equilibration time.