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Making Quantum Dynamics Exact
April 19, 2021•
Physics 14, 60
Three new studies provide analytical descriptions and exact solutions for various aspects of thermodynamics in quantum many-body systems.
Figure 1: A graphical representation of a quantum circuit known as Rule 54. The circuit was used by Katja Klobas and colleagues to provide an exact description of the thermalization process of a quantum many-body system [2].×
The concept of thermodynamics is nearing its 175th birthday. Despite the longevity of the field, many thermodynamics-related questions remain unanswered. One of those questions is exactly how the laws of thermodynamics emerge in a many-body, quantum system. Another is how to characterize chaos in that same system. Both problems involve understanding how quantum entanglement evolves in a complex quantum system, something that has been hard to study because solving the models used to describe such systems is numerically costly in time and computing power