Find in Library

We investigate the equilibration and thermalization properties of quantum systems interacting with a finite-dimensional environment. By exploiting the concept of time-averaged states, we introduce a completely positive map which allows us to describe in a quantitative way the dependence of the equilibrium state on the initial condition. Our results show that the thermalization of quantum systems is favored if the dynamics induces small system–environment correlations, as well as small changes in the environment, as measured by the trace distance.