Prethermalization with negative specific heat

Abstract

We study non-canonical relaxation in a composite cold atoms system, consisting of subsystems that possess negative microcanonical specific heat. The system exhibits pre-thermalization far away from integrability due to the appearance of a single adiabatic invariant. The Thirring instability drives the constituent subsystems towards the edges of their allowed energy spectrum, thus greatly enhancing the contrast between the prethermal state and the long time thermal outcome.