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, non-commuting charges were shown to reduce entropy-production rates and may enhance finite-size deviations from eigenstate thermalization. This talk briefly introduces non-commuting thermodynamic charges and then explores a recent technical result: non-commuting charges can increase entanglement.
This video was produced by the Fields Institute, as part of their Quantum Information Seminar series.
