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NUS Physics Breakthrough of the Year: 2024

Deep Thermalization in Gaussian Continuous-Variable Quantum Systems
February 13, 2025 NUS Physics Breakthrough of the Year: 2024

Deep thermalization is an emergent universal behaviour occurring in the equilibration dynamics of quantum many-body systems, which goes beyond regular thermalization. Dr. Liu Chang and graduate student Huang Qi, led by Prof. Ho Wen Wei, considered a system of a collection of bosonic particles (in more technical terms, “continuous-variable systems”), and studied the distribution of post-measurement wavefunctions arising after complex entangling dynamics, beginning from simple Gaussian states. After long times, they predicted that that the wavefunctions are distributed in a novel way over phase space: they are unentangled (i.e. are coherent-states) and have random fluctuations in particle number (i.e. displacements) in a way that aligns with a generalized maximum entropy principle. Their findings, which harnessed the power of quantum information theory in uncovering new physical principles, were published in Phys. Rev. Lett. 133, 260401 (Dec 2024).

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