title: Entropy production and equilibration in Yang-Mills quantum mechanics.
abstract: The Husimi distribution provides for a coarse-grained representation of the phase-space distribution of a quantum system, which may be used to track the growth of entropy of the system. We present a general and systematic method of solving the Husimi equation of motion for an isolated quantum system, and we construct a coarse-grained Hamiltonian whose expectation value is exactly conserved. As an application, we numerically solve the Husimi equation of motion for two-dimensional Yang-Mills quantum mechanics (the x-y model) and calculate the time evolution of the coarse-grained entropy of a highly excited state. We show that the coarse-grained entropy saturates to a value that coincides with the microcanonical entropy corresponding to the energy of the system.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA.
authors.forename: Hung-Ming
authors.initials: HM
authors.lastname: Tsai
authors.forename: Berndt
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Müller
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004735:Energy Transfer; D019277:Entropy; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D044367:Phase Transition; D013816:Thermodynamics