Thermalizing open systems show "transient democratization" of states.

A general expression for thermalization of arbitrary systems through a Lindbladian operator is formulated in terms of the system's energy levels. Upon application to some bosonic or fermionic system, we find that thermalization of the states is achieved in a time inversely proportional to the strength of the Lindblad operator. A remarkable feature of the results, which invites experimental testing, is the initial overshooting of the entropy over its long-term value, a phenomenon which appears to recur in all our numerical experimentations. It may be termed a "transient democratization", in that transiently more energy states participate in excitation,than in the long-term state.