Quantum transport in disordered systems poses intriguing fundamental questions about the interplay of disorder, interactions, and decoherence, with important implications for nanoscale energy transfer and quantum information transfer. Here, we investigate the emergence of multiple transport timescales in the dissipative dynamics of a spin impurity coupled to a small, spatially disordered network of spins. Using a two-dimensional tight-binding model with dipolar interactions and local dephasing, we demonstrate that geometric heterogeneity leads to hierarchical coupling strengths and pronounced separation of dynamical timescales. By analyzing different metrics for dynamics, we identify distinct relaxation timescales associated with cluster-level equilibration and global equilibration. A minimal three-site model reveals the physical origin of the longest timescale: strong internal hybridization generates an effective detuning that suppresses transfer to other weakly coupled sites, yielding a parametrically enhanced relaxation time in the weak-dephasing regime. We corroborate this picture with nonequilibrium steady-state transport calculations and simulations of disordered spin configurations, demonstrating orders-of-magnitude slowing of relaxation when hierarchical couplings are present. Our results highlight the central role of geometry and connectivity in spin networks and open quantum systems in general, and provide experimentally relevant predictions for relaxation times in small spin baths.
We consider the problem of relaxation in a one-dimensional system of interacting electrons. In the limit of weak interactions, we calculate the decay rate of a single-electron excitation, accounting for the nonlinear dispersion. The leading processes that determine the relaxation involve scattering of three particles. We elucidate how particular forms of Coulomb interaction, unscreened and screened, lead to different results for the decay rates and identify the dominant scattering processes responsible for relaxation of excitations of different energies. Interestingly, temperatures much smaller than the excitation energy strongly affect the rate. At higher temperatures the quasiparticle relaxes by exciting copropagating electron-hole pairs, whereas at lowest temperatures the relaxation proceeds via excitations of both copropagating and counterpropagating pairs.
Systems of strongly interacting dipoles offer an attractive platform to study many-body localized phases, owing to their long coherence times and strong interactions. We explore conditions under which such localized phases persist in the presence of power-law interactions and supplement our analytic treatment with numerical evidence of localized states in one dimension. We propose and analyze several experimental systems that can be used to observe and probe such states, including ultracold polar molecules and solid-state magnetic spin impurities.
Motivated by neutral excitations in disordered electronic materials and systems of trapped ultracold particles with long-range interactions, we study energy-level statistics of quasiparticles with the power-law hopping Hamiltonian $\ensuremath{\propto}1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ in a strong random potential. In solid-state systems such quasiparticles, which are exemplified by neutral dipolar excitations, lead to long-range correlations of local observables and may dominate energy transport. Focusing on the excitations in disordered electronic systems, we compute the energy-level correlation function ${R}_{2}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ in a finite system in the limit of sufficiently strong disorder. At small energy differences, the correlations exhibit Wigner-Dyson statistics. In particular, in the limit of very strong disorder the energy-level correlation function is given by ${R}_{2}(\ensuremath{\omega},V)={A}_{3}\frac{\ensuremath{\omega}}{{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{V}}$ for small frequencies $\ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\ll}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{V}$ and ${R}_{2}(\ensuremath{\omega},V)=1\ensuremath{-}(\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{-}d){A}_{1}{\left(\frac{{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{V}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}\right)}^{\frac{d}{\ensuremath{\alpha}}}\ensuremath{-}{A}_{2}{\left(\frac{{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{V}}{\ensuremath{\omega}}\right)}^{2}$ for large frequencies $\ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\gg}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{V}$, where ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{V}\ensuremath{\propto}{V}^{\ensuremath{-}\frac{\ensuremath{\alpha}}{d}}$ is the characteristic matrix element of excitation hopping in a system of volume
V, and
A1,A2, and
A3 are coefficients of order unity which depend on the shape of the system. The energy-level correlation function, which we study, allows for a direct experimental observation, for example, by measuring the correlations of the ac conductance of the system at different frequencies.
Quantum phase transitions occur strictly at zero temperature and are accessed by varying a physical parameter such as a magnetic field or chemical potential. While these transitions themselves are experimentally inaccessible, the existence of a zero temperature quantum critical point has remarkable effects on the dynamical properties of interacting quantum many-body systems at finite temperatures. In this thesis, we study dynamics in four strongly interacting many-body systems near quantum critical points in the context of NMR relaxation, quantum quenches, many-body quantum chaos, and charge diffusion. In chapter 1, we begin by revisiting the issue of NMR relaxation in the quantum disordered phase of Ising spin chains. We find that the imaginary part of the spin susceptibility at low frequences is dominated by rare quantum processes which leads to an NMR relaxation rate that scales as
1/T1∼exp(−T2Δ) near the quantum critical point rather than the previously conjectured
1/T1∼exp(−TΔ). These results resolve certain discrepancies between the energy scales measured with different experimental probes in the quantum disordered paramagnetic phase of the Ising chain system
CoNb2O6. In chapter 2, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) models with
q body interactions after a quantum quench, considering a quench protocol which drives the system from an initial state with long-lived quasiparticle excitations to a final state lacking any long-lived quasiparticle excitations. For
q=4, we find that the timescale for the system to locally thermalize
τeq∼kBTℏ and for
q→∞ we find that the system thermalizes instantaneously. In chapter 3, we study the real time dynamics of quantum electrodynamics in 2+1 dimensions with
Nf flavors of fermions. We focus on thermalization and the onset of many-body quantum chaos and compute the quantum Lyapunov exponent in a
Nf1 expansion. We briefly comment on chaos, locality, and gauge invariance. Finally, in Chapter 4 we consider whether the butterfly velocity - a speed at which quantum information propagates - may provide a fundamental bound on diffusion constants in dirty incoherent metals by computing the charge diffusion constant and the butterfly velocity in charge-neutral holographic matter with long wavelength ``hydrodynamic" disorder. In this limit, we find that the butterfly velocity does not set a sharp lower bound for the charge diffusion constant.
We theoretically investigate the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of irregular one- and two-dimensional arrays of Rydberg dipoles featuring spatially anisotropic interactions. Starting from a collectively polarized initial state, we map out the dynamical phase diagram and identify a crossover between regimes of regular and anomalously slow relaxation of the initial collective order that strongly depends on both the degree of interaction disorder and anisotropy. In addition, we find that the regime of slow relaxation is characterized by a subballistic propagation of correlations that remained confined to short distances even at long times. To explain our findings we develop an analytic model based on decoupled clusters of interacting dipoles that goes beyond prior theoretical works and enables us to identify multiple relaxation timescales. Our findings can be relevant for a wide variety of quantum science platforms naturally featuring disordered dipolar interactions, including polar molecules, frozen Rydberg gases, and nitrogen-vacancy centers.