Sci Rep. 2012;2:243. doi: 10.1038/srep00243. Epub 2012 Feb 6.
When classical systems fail to explore their entire configurational space, intriguing macroscopic phenomena like aging and glass formation may emerge. Also closed quanto-mechanical systems may stop wandering freely around the whole Hilbert space, even if they are initially prepared into a macroscopically large combination of eigenstates. Here, we report numerical evidences that the dynamics of strongly interacting lattice bosons driven sufficiently far from equilibrium can be trapped into extremely long-lived inhomogeneous metastable states. The slowing down of incoherent density excitations above a threshold energy, much reminiscent of a dynamical arrest on the verge of a glass transition, is identified as the key feature of this phenomenon. We argue that the resulting long-lived inhomogeneities are responsible for the lack of thermalization observed in large systems. Such a rich phenomenology could be experimentally uncovered upon probing the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of conveniently prepared quantum states of trapped cold atoms which we hereby suggest.
当经典系统无法探索其整个构型空间时，可能会出现像老化和玻璃形成这样有趣的宏观现象。此外，封闭的量子力学系统可能会停止在整个希尔伯特空间中自由漫游，即使它们最初被制备成一个宏观上的大量本征态组合。在这里，我们报告了数值证据，表明在远离平衡的情况下，强烈相互作用的晶格玻色子的动力学可以被捕获到极其长寿命的非均匀亚稳态中。在高于阈值能量的非相干密度激发的减速，非常类似于玻璃转变边缘的动力学捕获，被确定为这一现象的关键特征。我们认为，由此产生的长寿命非均匀性是造成在大系统中观察到的热化缺失的原因。通过探测我们在此建议的被俘获冷原子的量子态的非平衡动力学，可以实验性地揭示出这种丰富的现象学。
