Rapid Thermalization of Spin Chain Commuting Hamiltonians

Abstract

We prove that spin chains weakly coupled to a large heat bath thermalize rapidly at any temperature for finite-range, translation-invariant commuting Hamiltonians, reaching equilibrium in a time which scales logarithmically with the system size. This generalizes to the quantum regime a seminal result of Holley and Stroock from 1989 for classical spin chains and represents an exponential improvement over previous bounds based on the nonclosure of the spectral gap. We discuss the implications in the context of dissipative phase transitions and in the study of symmetry protected topological phases.

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