Anti-thermalization: Heating by cooling and vice versa

Common intuition tells us that if one part of a connected system is cooled continuously, the other parts should also cool down. This intuition can be given a microscopic foundation for the case of a generic quantum system coupled to a "lead" that is maintained at a given temperature. We show that by suppressing resonant energy exchange between the two parts, one can reverse the fate of the system, namely, it can heat up toward its most excited state as the lead is cooled to its ground state, and vice versa. This anti-thermal dynamics arises in a broad class of systems with a conserved U(1) charge, and can be tested with two qubits in existing setups. We show that the mechanism allows one to prepare mid-spectrum nonclassical states, stable temperature gradients in closed systems, and highly athermal states where subspaces heat in the presence of overall cooling. Our findings highlight the critical role played by the nature of the coupling and reveal a rich interplay between symmetry and resonance effects in the dynamics of thermalization.