Mpemba effect and super-accelerated thermalization in the damped quantum harmonic oscillator

Quantum 9, 1677 (2025).

https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2025-03-26-1677

The behavior of systems far from equilibrium is often complex and unpredictable, challenging and sometimes overturning the physical intuition derived from equilibrium scenarios. One striking example of this is the Mpemba effect, which implies that non-equilibrium states can sometimes relax more rapidly when they are further from equilibrium. Despite a rich historical background, the precise conditions and mechanisms behind this phenomenon remain unclear. Recently, there has been growing interest in investigating accelerated relaxation and Mpemba-like effects within quantum systems. In this work, we explore a quantum manifestation of the Mpemba effect in a simple and paradigmatic model of open quantum systems: the damped quantum harmonic oscillator, which describes the relaxation of a bosonic mode in contact with a thermal bath at finite temperature $T$. By means of an exact analytical analysis of the relaxation dynamics based on the method of moments in both population and coherence subspaces, we demonstrate that any initial distribution of populations with the first $r$ moments exactly matching those of the equilibrium distribution shows a super-accelerated relaxation to equilibrium at a rate linearly increasing with $r$, leading to a pronounced Mpemba effect. In particular, one can find a broad class of far-from-equilibrium distributions that relax to equilibrium faster than any other initial thermal state with a temperature $T’$ arbitrarily close to $T$. The super-accelerated relaxation effect is shown to persist even for a broad class of initial states with non-vanishing coherences, and a general criterion for the observation of super-accelerated thermalization is presented.