Thermalization of Finite Many-Body Systems by a Collision Model

We construct a collision model description of the thermalization of a finite many-body system by using careful derivation of the corresponding Lindblad-type master equation in the weak coupling regime. Using the example of a two-level target system, we show that collision model thermalization is crucially dependent on the various relevant system and bath timescales and on ensuring that the environment is composed of ancillae which are resonant with the system transition frequencies. Using this, we extend our analysis to show that our collision model can lead to thermalization for certain classes of many-body systems. We establish that for classically correlated systems our approach is effective, while we also highlight its shortcomings, in particular with regards to reaching entangled thermal states.