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. 2017 Jul 21;7:6118. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-06193-0

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Cartoon of the suggested cold-atom experiment. 1. Prepare a trapped cloud of noninteracting atoms at a temperature T _B. 2. Introduce a barrier that separates the system into A and a bath B. 3. Using a laser, heat up the atoms in region A to temperature T _A. 4. At time t = 0 remove the barrier between A and B, letting the two subsystems thermalize. 5. After a time t = t′ reintroduce the barrier between A and B. 6. Remove the trap around region B. 7. Remove the trap around A and perform a time-of-flight measurement of the kinetic energy of the atoms in A. The steps 1–7 should be repeated for different times t′ to obtain the energy in A as a function of time after the quench.