A quick tap on a physical system now reveals exactly how it will settle into total equilibrium hours or days later.
Scientists have long struggled to bridge the gap between how a system reacts to a small nudge and how it eventually reaches a stable temperature. The Kubo-Thermalization correspondence provides a direct mathematical link between these two wildly different timescales. By measuring the response of a material in the first few milliseconds, researchers can now predict its long-term thermal behavior. This eliminates the need for massive, long-running simulations or experiments to see the final state. It fundamentally changes our ability to design materials that stay stable over very long periods. This could lead to batteries and electronics that are much more predictable and safer over their entire lifespan.
The Kubo-Thermalization Correspondence
arXiv · 2605.06666
Quantum thermalization describes how interacting quantum systems relax toward thermal equilibrium, a central problem in modern physics. Yet most experimental information on many-body systems comes from short-time transition spectroscopy, typically interpreted within Kubo's linear-response framework. These perspectives - long-time equilibration versus short-time response - seem fundamentally disconnected. Here we establish an exact link between them: the Kubo-Thermalization correspondence, which