Dr. Marcos Rigol
Physics Department
University of Southern California


"Statistical mechanics of an integrable system after relaxation"

When a gas of interacting particles is brought out of equilibrium, usually microscopic collisions enable the system to reach the state of thermal equilibrium. What happens when the system is at or near an integrable point? Integrable quantum many-body systems traditionally belong to the domain of mathematical physics, with little or no connection to experiments. However, recent experiments with confined degenerate quantum gases in one dimension have provided genuine realizations of a number of integrable systems, thus making them phenomenologically relevant. In this talk we will describe some of these experiments. We then address the question of whether a many-body interacting quantum system with a full set of conserved quantities can undergo a relaxation to an equilibrium state, and, if it can, what the properties of such state are.