Non-equilibrium dynamics of isolated quantum systems

Abstract

The non-equilibrium dynamics of isolated quantum systems represent a theoretical and experimental challenge raising many fundamental questions with applications to different fields of modern physics. In these proceedings, we briefly review some of the recent findings on the subject, with particular emphasis to the existence of stationary expectation values of local observables and to their statistical mechanics description. It turns out that the appropriate statistical ensemble describing these asymptotic values depends on whether the Hamiltonian governing the time evolution is integrable or not.