Universal energy fluctuations in thermally isolated driven systems

Abstract

When an isolated system is brought in contact with a heat bath, its final energy is random and follows the Gibbs distribution—this finding is a cornerstone of statistical physics. The system’s energy can also be changed by performing non-adiabatic work using a cyclic process. Almost nothing is known about the resulting energy distribution in this set-up, which is in particular relevant to recent experimental progress in cold atoms, ion traps, superconducting qubits and other systems. Here we show that when the non-adiabatic process consists of many repeated cyclic processes, the resulting energy distribution is universal and different from the Gibbs ensemble. We predict the existence of two qualitatively different regimes with a continuous second-order-like transition between them. We illustrate our approach by performing explicit calculations for both interacting and non-interacting systems.