At IACS Kolkata, Krishnendu Sengupta is working on cheating “heat death.” When you drive a quantum system periodically, it usually absorbs energy endlessly until it burns out into a chaotic, infinite-temperature state. Sengupta demonstrated that by using a two-rate driving protocol, researchers can hit a sweet spot where the system’s quantum state essentially freezes. By mapping this phenomenon to what physicists call an integrable XXZ spin chain, his team is uncovering emergent symmetries that could one day act as a shield to protect fragile quantum information.
