Special INTRIQ/CPM Seminar

Noncommuting charges and their effect on entanglement

Shayan Majidy

Institute for Quantum Computing
University of Waterloo

In conventional thermodynamics, a system of interest and an environment exchange quantities — energy, particles, electric charge, etc. — that are globally conserved and are represented by Hermitian operators. These operators were implicitly assumed to commute with each other, until a few years ago. Freeing the operators to fail to commute has enabled many theoretical discoveries. For example, noncommuting charges were shown to reduce entropy-production rates and may enhance finite-size deviations from eigenstate thermalization. This talk briefly introduces noncommuting thermodynamic charges and then explores a recent technical result &mdashnoncommuting charges can increase entanglement.

Shayan Majidy, Aleksander Lasek, David A. Huse, and Nicole Yunger Halpern Phys. Rev. B 107, 045102.