Phase Thermalization: from Fermi Liquid to Incoherent Metal

Abstract

When a system consists of a large subsystem (bath) and a small one (probe), thermalization implies induction of temperature of the bath onto the probe. If both the bath and the probe are described by same microscopic Hamiltonian, thermalisation further entails that the probe imbibes the phase of the bath. We refer to this phenomenon as phase thermalization. However, it is not clear whether this phenomenon is realizable when the probe and the bath are described by different microscopic Hamiltonians. We show phase thermalization is possible even when the microscopic Hamiltonians differ significantly. We provide an explicit example, where the probe is a Fermi liquid realised by a Majorana chain with \(n \gg 1\) fermions per site interacting through random hopping and the bath is an incoherent metal described by another Majorana chain with \(N > n\) fermions per site interacting through arbitrarily long range random four-fermion interaction. In deep infrared (i.e. at very low energies), the probe turns into an incoherent metal, with Lyapunov spectrum and diffusion coefficient identical to the bath.