Thermalization from quantum entanglement: jet simulations in the massive Schwinger model

ORAL

Abstract

We investigate the emergence of thermalization in a quantum field-theoretic model mimicking the production of jets in QCD -- the massive Schwinger model coupled to external sources. Specifically, we compute the expectation values of local operators as functions of time and compare them to their thermal counterparts, quantify the overlap between the evolving density matrix and the thermal one, and compare the dynamics of the energy-momentum tensor to predictions from relativistic hydrodynamics. Through these studies, we find that the system approaches thermalization at late times and elucidate the mechanisms by which quantum entanglement drives thermalization in closed field-theoretic systems. Our results show how thermodynamic behavior emerges in real time from unitary quantum dynamics.

*This work was supportedby the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics, Grants No. DE-FG88ER41450 (D.K., A.P.) and DE-SC0012704 (A.F., S.G., D.K.) and by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, National Quantum Information Science Research Centers, Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA) under Contract No.DE-SC0012704 (A.F., S.G., D.K.). A.F. is supported by the DFG through Emmy Noether Programme (project number 545261797. D.F. was supported by DOE under contract No. DE-SC0012704 and by BNL LDRD project No. 25-033B. S.G. was supported in part by a Feodor Lynen Research fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation. S.S. is supported by National Key Research and Development Program of China under Contract No. 2024YFA1610700 and by Tsinghua University under grants No. 043-531205006 and No. 043-53330500.

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Publication: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14983

Presenters

  • David Frenklakh

    • Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)

Authors

  • Sebastian Grieninger

    • University of Washington

  • David Frenklakh

    • Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL)

  • Adrien Florio

    • Brookhaven National Laboratory

  • Dmitri E Kharzeev

    • Stony Brook University (SUNY)

  • Andrea Palermo

    • Stony Brook University

  • Shuzhe Shi

    • Tsinghua University