Title | Experimental observation of thermalisation with noncommuting charges |
Publication Type | Journal Article |
Year of Publication | 2022 |
Authors | Kranzl, F, Lasek, A, Joshi, MK, Kalev, A, Blatt, R, Roos, CF, Halpern, NYunger |
Date Published | 2/9/2022 |
Keywords | FOS: Physical sciences, Quantum Physics (quant-ph), Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) |
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. However, 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 interactions 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. |
URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.04652 |
DOI | 10.48550/ARXIV.2202.04652 |