Experimental observation of thermalisation with noncommuting charges

Published

February 9, 2022

Author(s)

Florian Kranzl, Aleksander Lasek, Manoj Joshi, Amir Kalev, Rainer Blatt, Christian Roos, Nicole Halpern

Abstract

Quantum simulators have recently enabled experimental observations of quantum many-body systems' internal thermalisation. Often, the global energy and particle number are conserved, and the system is prepared with a well-defined particle number—in a microcanonical subspace. How- ever, quantum evolution can also conserve quantities, or charges, that fail to commute with each other. Noncommuting charges have recently emerged as a subfield at the intersection of quantum thermodynamics and quantum information. Until now, this subfield has remained theoretical. We initiate the experimental testing of its predictions, with a trapped-ion simulator. We prepare 6–15 spins in an approximate microcanonical subspace, a generalisation of the microcanonical subspace for accommodating noncommuting charges, which cannot necessarily have well-defined nontrivial values simultaneously. We simulate a Heisenberg evolution using laser-induced entangling interac- tions and collective spin rotations. The noncommuting charges are the three spin components. We find that small subsystems equilibrate to near a recently predicted non-Abelian thermal state. This work bridges quantum many-body simulators to the quantum thermodynamics of noncommuting charges, whose predictions can now be tested.

Citation

arXiv

Pub Type

Journals

Citation

Kranzl, F. , Lasek, A. , Joshi, M. , Kalev, A. , Blatt, R. , Roos, C. and Halpern, N. (2022), Experimental observation of thermalisation with noncommuting charges, arXiv (Accessed February 19, 2026)