title: Prethermalization and Thermalization in Models with Weak Integrability Breaking.
abstract: We study the effects of integrability-breaking perturbations on the nonequilibrium evolution of many-particle quantum systems. We focus on a class of spinless fermion models with weak interactions. We employ equation of motion techniques that can be viewed as generalizations of quantum Boltzmann equations. We benchmark our method against time-dependent density matrix renormalization group computations and find it to be very accurate as long as interactions are weak. For small integrability breaking, we observe robust prethermalization plateaux for local observables on all accessible time scales. Increasing the strength of the integrability-breaking term induces a "drift" away from the prethermalization plateaux towards thermal behavior. We identify a time scale characterizing this crossover.
authors.affiliation: The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3NP, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Bertini
authors.affiliation: The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3NP, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Fabian H L
authors.initials: FH
authors.lastname: Essler
authors.affiliation: The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3NP, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Groha
authors.affiliation: The Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3NP, United Kingdom.|Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973, USA.
authors.forename: Neil J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Robinson