%0 Journal Article %D 2022 %T Experimental observation of thermalisation with noncommuting charges %A Kranzl, Florian %A Lasek, Aleksander %A Joshi, Manoj K. %A Kalev, Amir %A Blatt, Rainer %A Roos, Christian F. %A Nicole Yunger Halpern %K FOS: Physical sciences %K Quantum Physics (quant-ph) %K Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) %X

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.

%8 2/9/2022 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.04652 %R 10.48550/ARXIV.2202.04652