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---noncommuting charges can increase entanglement.
Host: Aephraim Steinberg