{
  "abstract": "Prethermalization describes long-lived intermediate regimes that precede equilibrium and can dominate experimentally accessible dynamics. Here, we show that a separation of spectral energy scales, despite giving rise to a hierarchy of dynamical timescales, does not by itself guarantee the appearance of a prethermal plateau. Under the same Hamiltonian, some observables may exhibit prethermal behavior, while others relax directly toward equilibrium. We uncover the mechanism governing this selectivity, showing that the emergence of a prethermal plateau depends not only on the Hamiltonian, but also on the observable and the initial state. Our results apply broadly to systems close to a fully permutation-symmetric limit and are illustrated with a long-range interacting spin model. We further prove that the Loschmidt echo provides a lower bound on the prethermal lifetime of any bounded observable whenever the prethermal and exact dynamics are unitary.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2609.01606",
  "author_total": 3,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "C. L. Sriram"
    },
    {
      "name": "Soumya Kanti Pal"
    },
    {
      "name": "Lea F. Santos"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/48z9kyh03qme1.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2609.01606",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "48z9kyh03qme1",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01606",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cond-mat.stat-mech"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "quant-ph"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "3107|Quantum many-body systems"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7206169719",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.01606",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-01",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/48z9kyh03qme1.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:18:00Z",
      "native_id": "2609.01606",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01606"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:quant-ph",
      "subfield": "quantum"
    },
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:cond-mat.stat-mech",
      "subfield": "statistical-nonlinear"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Observable- and state-selective prethermalization and bounds on prethermal lifetimes",
  "title_text": "Observable- and state-selective prethermalization and bounds on prethermal lifetimes",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:18:00Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/48z9kyh03qme1",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}