Ikke-termaliserende kvantesystemer og opdukkende symmetri

The laws of thermodynamics have huge consequences for how physical systems behave, and finding something that does not thermalize opens up new opportunities, for instance with respect to information storage. At the moment, we know relatively little about exceptions to thermal behavior in quantum systems. One important class of nonthermal systems has been identified and investigated thoroughly, but recently it has become clear that there are many other examples. Research in this area is important, because it is likely that there are entirely new types of behaviors to be discovered. It is also important, because we would like to have a complete understanding of how quantum systems can behave and when they behave in a particular way.

We will construct new types of models of quantum mechanical systems and investigate their properties numerically. The standard way to construct quantum mechanical models is to start from a description of how the particles interact and then translate that into a model. We will obtain models with unusual properties by turning the construction upside down. We start from special states giving rise to the unusual properties, and then we determine how the particles should interact to have these states present in the model. Once the model is constructed, we study it further with large scale computer simulations. When we find interesting new behaviors, we also investigate how simple we can make the models, while still maintaining the interesting properties.