A universal speed limit for spreading of coherence

13 Nov 2025 | Category: Science

Discoveries of fundamental limits for the rates of physical processes, from the speed of light to the Lieb–Robinson bound for information propagation1,2, often lead to breakthroughs in the understanding of the underlying physics. Here we observe such a limit for a paradigmatic many-body phenomenon, the spreading of coherence during the formation of a weakly interacting Bose–Einstein condensate3–18. We study condensate formation in an isolated homogeneous atomic gas19,20 that is initially far from equilibrium, in an incoherent low-energy state, and condenses as it relaxes towards equilibrium. T

Understanding the dynamics of far-from-equilibrium many-body systems, including the emergence of long-range order in such systems, is an outstanding problem in physics, relevant from subnuclear to cosmological length scales21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,...

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