Quasi-adiabatic thermal ensemble preparation in the thermodynamic limit

Abstract: We investigate a quasi-adiabatic thermal process for preparing finite-temperature ensembles in the thermodynamic limit. The process gradually transforms a thermal ensemble of a noninteracting system into that of an interacting system of interest over a finite operation time, with the temperature controlled by parameters associated with the entropy of the initial state. We analyze this process in both nonintegrable and integrable spin chains with translational invariance. For the nonintegrable case, numerical simulations show that the thermal properties of local observables are accurately reproduced with a single parameter in the high temperature regime, although the operation time increases exponentially with precision. In contrast, for the integrable transverse-field Ising model, we analytically show that an extensive number of parameters tied to local conserved quantities is generally necessary, and that the operation time increases linearly with system size, diverging in the thermodynamic limit. These results clarify the potential and limitations of the quasi-adiabatic thermal process for an ensemble preparation and highlight the role of integrability in determining its efficiency.