Younger Halpern publishes in NPJ Quantum Information

Nicole Yunger Halpern (NIST/IPST/QuICS) co-authored an article with Shayan Majidy, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics titled “How to build Hamiltonians that transport noncommuting charges in quantum thermodynamics” and published in npj Quantum Information, January 27, 2022.

“ … Noncommuting conserved quantities have recently launched a subfield of quantum thermodynamics. 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—about reference frames, entropy production, resource-theory models, etc. Little work has bridged these results from abstract theory to experimental reality. Their paper provides a methodology for building this bridge systematically: we present a prescription for constructing Hamiltonians that conserve noncommuting quantities globally while transporting the quantities locally.”