Fig. 3: Prethermalization through rare events.
From: Prethermalization in one-dimensional quantum many-body systems with confinement
a Typical semiclassical trajectories obtained with the Truncated Wigner Approximation. Most fermions belong to mesons at rest (blue lines), but rare events in which mesons are in close vicinity lead to an avalanche effect putting mesons in motion (red lines) and activating dynamics in the entire meson ensemble. b For comparably small values of h∥ semiclassical results for the average meson coverage ρM agree well with exact quantum evolution obtained from tensor network techniques. (Inset) The semiclassical analysis reveals relaxation towards a prethermal plateau (red), which is distinct from the thermal state in the absence of meson conservation (green dashed). Side panels: Relaxation of the semiclassical ensemble is also reflected in the decay of the the momentum distribution P(k) at k ≈ 0. Thermal (μ = 0) and prethermal (μ fixed by number of mesons) predictions are computed with Eq. (3), directly in the classical limit.
