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Many-body entropies, correlations, and emergence of statistical relaxation in interaction quench dynamics of ultracold bosons

We study the quantum many-body dynamics and the entropy production triggered by an interaction quench in a system of $N=10$ interacting identical bosons in an external one-dimensional harmonic trap. The multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for bosons (MCTDHB) is used for solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation at a high level of accuracy. We consider many-body entropy measures such as the Shannon information entropy, number of principal components, and occupation entropy that are computed from the time-dependent many-body basis set used in MCTDHB. These measures quantify relevant physical features such as irregular or chaotic dynamics, statistical relaxation and thermalization. We monitor the entropy measures as a function of time and assess how they depend on the interaction strength. For larger interaction strength, the many-body information entropy approaches the value predicted for the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble of random matrices and implies statistical relaxation. The basis states of MCTDHB are explicitly time-dependent and optimized by the variational principle in a way that minimizes the number of significantly contributing ones. It is therefore a non-trivial fact that statistical relaxation prevails in MCTDHB computations. Moreover, we demonstrate a fundamental connection between the production of entropy, the build-up of correlations and loss of coherence in the system. Since the coherence and correlations are experimentally accessible, their present connection to many-body entropies can be scrutinized to detect statistical relaxation. Our results are the first ones obtained for thermalization of finite quantum systems using an optimized time-dependent and genuinely many-body basis set.