Impact of local integrals of motion to metastable non-equilibrium states

Abstract

We analyse the stationary behaviour of correlations in a strongly correlated Bose gas out of equilibrium. The dynamics are triggered by a quench of the interaction starting from the strongly interacting limit where the system is in a perfect Mott state. Despite the complete integrability of our theoretical description, we find seemingly thermal behaviour for the experimentally measurable correlations at large interactions. Quite opposed, away from the strongly interacting regime these correlation functions show highly non-thermal stationary values. This behaviour is explained by overlaps of the integrals of motion with the observable and the initial state in an effective thermal ensemble. These results suggest that non-equilibrium Mazur equalities are an efficient way to calculate short range correlations for arbitrary integrable models.