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Universal Relaxation Speedup in Nonequilibrium Quantum Many-Body Systems through Transient Resetting

Parvinder Solanki1,2,*, Igor Lesanovsky1,3, and Gabriele Perfetto4,†

  • 1Institut für Theoretische Physik and Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology, Universität Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 14, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
  • 2Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala 695547, India
  • 3School of Physics and Astronomy and Centre for the Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of Quantum Non-Equilibrium Systems, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2RD, United Kingdom
  • 4Institut für Theoretische Physik, ETH Zürich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 27, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland

  • *Contact author: parvindersolanki@iist.ac.in
  • †Contact author: gperfetto@phys.ethz.ch
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 190404 – Published 5 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/45dj-n19c

Abstract

Speeding up the relaxation dynamics of many-body quantum systems is important in a variety of contexts, including quantum computation and state preparation. We demonstrate that such acceleration can be universally achieved via transient stochastic resetting. This means that during an initial time interval of finite duration, the dynamics is interrupted by resets that take the system to a designated state at randomly selected times. We illustrate this idea for few-body open systems and also for a challenging many-body case, where a first-order phase transition leads to a divergence of relaxation time. In all scenarios, a significant and sometimes even exponential acceleration in reaching the stationary state is observed, similar to the so-called Mpemba effect. The universal nature of this speedup lies in the fact that the design of the resetting protocol only requires knowledge of a few macroscopic properties of the target state, such as the order parameter of the phase transition, while it does not necessitate any fine-tuned manipulation of the initial state.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 190404– Published 5 November, 2026
  • Received 22 December 2025
  • Revised 17 July 2026
  • Accepted 28 September 2026
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