PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Prethermalization refers to the remarkable relaxation behavior which an integrable many-body system in the presence of a weak integrability-breaking perturbation may exhibit: After initial transients have died out, it stays for a long time close to some nonthermal steady state, but on even much larger time scales, it ultimately switches over to the proper thermal equilibrium behavior. By extending Deutsch's conceptual framework from Phys. Rev. A 43, 2046 (1991), we analytically predict that prethermalization is a typical feature for a very general class of such weakly perturbed systems.