Noncommuting conserved charges in quantum many-body thermalization
Noncommuting conserved charges in quantum many-body thermalization
In statistical mechanics, a small system exchanges conserved quantities-heat, particles, electric charge, etc.-with a bath. The small system thermalizes to the canonical ensemble or the grand canonical ensemble, etc., depending on the quantities. The conserved quantities are represented by operators usually assumed to commute with each other. This assumption was …