title: Typical fast thermalization processes in closed many-body systems.
abstract: The lack of knowledge about the detailed many-particle motion on the microscopic scale is a key issue in any theoretical description of a macroscopic experiment. For systems at or close to thermal equilibrium, statistical mechanics provides a very successful general framework to cope with this problem. However, far from equilibrium, only very few quantitative and comparably universal results are known. Here a quantum mechanical prediction of this type is derived and verified against various experimental and numerical data from the literature. It quantitatively describes the entire temporal relaxation towards thermal equilibrium for a large class (in a mathematically precisely defined sense) of closed many-body systems, whose initial state may be arbitrarily far from equilibrium.
authors.affiliation: Fakultät für Physik, Universität Bielefeld, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Reimann