The interplay between interaction, disorder, and dissipation has shown a rich phenomenology. Here, we investigate a disordered XXZ spin chain in contact with a bath which, alone, would drive the system toward a highly delocalized and coherent Dicke state. We show that there exist regimes for which the natural orbitals of the single-particle density matrix of the steady state are all localized in the presence of strong disorders, for either weak interaction or strong interaction. We show that the averaged steady-state occupation in the eigenbasis of the open system Hamiltonian could follow an exponential decay for intermediate disorder strength in the presence of weak interactions, while it is more evenly spread for strong disorder or for stronger interactions. Last, we show that strong dissipation increases the coherence of the steady states, thus reducing the signatures of localization. We capture such signatures of localization also with a concatenated inverse participation ratio that simultaneously takes into account how localized are the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and how close is the steady state to an incoherent mixture of different energy eigenstates.
The interplay between interaction, disorder, and dissipation has shown a rich phenomenology. Here, we investigate a disordered XXZ spin chain in contact with a bath which, alone, would drive the system toward a highly delocalized and coherent Dicke state. We show that there exist regimes for which the natural orbitals of the single-particle density matrix of the steady state are all localized in the presence of strong disorders, for either weak interaction or strong interaction. We show that the averaged steady-state occupation in the eigenbasis of the open system Hamiltonian could follow an exponential decay for intermediate disorder strength in the presence of weak interactions, while it is more evenly spread for strong disorder or for stronger interactions. Last, we show that strong dissipation increases the coherence of the steady states, thus reducing the signatures of localization. We capture such signatures of localization also with a concatenated inverse participation ratio that simultaneously takes into account how localized are the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian and how close is the steady state to an incoherent mixture of different energy eigenstates.
Many types of dissipative processes can be found in nature or be engineered, and their interplay with a system can give rise to interesting phases of matter. Here we study the interplay among interaction, tunneling, and disorder in the steady state of a spin chain coupled to a tailored bath. We consider a dissipation which, in contrast to disorder, tends to generate a homogeneously polarized steady state. We find that the steady state can be highly sensitive even to weak disorder. We also establish that, in the presence of such dissipation, even in the absence of interaction, a finite amount of disorder is needed for localization. Last, we show that for strong disorder the system reveals signatures of localization both in the weakly and strong interacting regimes.
We consider a one-dimensional (1D) quantum many-body system and investigate how the interplay between interaction and on-site disorder affects spatial localization and quantum correlations. The hopping amplitude is kept constant. To measure localization, we use the number of principal components (NPC), which quantifies the spreading of the system eigenstates over vectors of a given basis set. Quantum correlations are determined by a global entanglement measure Q , which quantifies the degree of entanglement of multipartite pure states. Our studies apply analogously to a 1D system of interacting spinless fermions, hard-core bosons, or yet to an XXZ Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain. Disorder is characterized by both uncorrelated and long-range correlated random on-site energies. Dilute and half-filled chains are analyzed. In half-filled clean chains, delocalization is maximum when the particles do not interact, whereas multi-partite entanglement is largest when they do. In the presence of uncorrelated disorder, NPC and Q show a nontrivial behavior with interaction, peaking in the chaotic region. The inclusion of correlated disorder may further extend two-particle states, but the effect decreases with the number of particles and the strength of their interactions. In half-filled chains with large interaction, correlated disorder may even enhance localization.
Strong local disorder in interacting quantum spin chains can turn delocalized eigenmodes into localized eigenstates, giving rise to many-body localized phases. This is accompanied by distinct spectral statistics: chaotic for the delocalized phase and integrable for the localized phase. In isolated systems, localization and chaos are defined through a web of relations among eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and real-time dynamics. These may change as the system is made open. We ask whether random dissipation (without random disorder) can induce chaotic or localized behavior in an otherwise integrable system. The dissipation is described using non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, which can effectively be obtained from Markovian dynamics conditioned on null measurement. In this non-Hermitian setting, we argue in favor of the use of the singular value decomposition. We complement the singular value statistics with different diagnostic tools, namely, the singular form factor and the inverse participation ratio and entanglement entropy of singular vectors. We thus identify a crossover of the singular values from chaotic to integrable spectral features and of the singular vectors from delocalization to localization. Our method is illustrated in an XXZ Hamiltonian with random local dissipation.
We consider two particles hopping on a chain with a contact interaction between them. At strong interaction, there is a molecular bound state separated by a direct gap from a continuous band of atomic states. Introducing weak disorder in the interaction, the molecular state becomes Anderson-localized. At stronger disorder, part of the molecular band delocalizes and dissociates due to its hybridization to the atomic band. We characterize these different regimes by computing the density of states, the inverse participation ratio, the level-spacing statistics, and the survival probability of an initially localized state. The atomic band is best described as that of a rough billiard for a single particle on a square lattice that shows signatures of quantum chaos. In addition to typical ``chaotic states,'' we find states that are localized along only one direction. These ``separatrix states'' are more localized than chaotic states, and similar in this respect to scarred states, but their existence is due to the separatrix isoenergy line in the interaction-free dispersion relation, rather than to unstable periodic orbits.
We show that the crossover from the weak interaction limit towards the strong interaction limit may be accompanied by a delocalization effect in one dimensional disordered quantum models. The spin degrees of freedom are frozen and the spatial wave functions remain symmetric or antisymmetric when the strength U of a short range interaction is varied. The study concerns the excited states for two interacting particles and the ground state for a finite density of carriers. First, for two particles in a chain of length L, we establish a duality transformation mapping the behavior at weak U onto the behavior at strong U. For intermediate U, the mixing of the one body states and the interaction induced delocalization effect are maximum. Furthermore, if L ≈︂ L1 (the one particle localization length), the system becomes weakly chaotic with critical spectral statistics. This weak chaos is related to the multifractality of the interaction matrix. For two particles starting close to each other, localization is reached in two steps. Before the time t1 necessary to propagate over L1 , U de-favors the propagation. On the contrary, U favors a very slow delocalization after t1 , characterized by a log(t) spreading of the center of mass. Similarly, the curvatures of the energy levels with respect to an enclosed magnetic flux decrease as a function of U for L < L1 and increase for L > L1 . The changes of the curvatures can be described by a conductance-like single scaling parameter. Second, using the density renormalization group algorithm, we have studied the ground state energy of a finite density of spinless fermions and its change under twisted boundary conditions. For a large disorder, a charge reorganization is induced by the interaction: When the system becomes instable between the inhomogeneous configuration driven by the random potential (Anderson insulator) and the homogeneous one driven by repulsive interactions (Mott insulator), the ground state sensitivity can be enhanced by orders of magnitude. In contrast, no enhancement occurs at weaker disorder, when there are many particles on a scale L1.
The quest for nonequilibrium quantum phase transitions is often hampered by the tendency of driving and dissipation to give rise to an effective temperature, resulting in classical behavior. Could this be different when the dissipation is engineered to drive the system into a nontrivial quantum coherent steady state? In this work we shed light on this issue by studying the effect of disorder on recently introduced dissipation-induced Chern topological states, and examining the eigenmodes of the Hermitian steady-state density matrix or entanglement Hamiltonian. We find that, similarly to equilibrium, each Landau band has a single delocalized level near its center. However, using three different finite-size scaling methods we show that the critical exponent $\ensuremath{\nu}$ describing the divergence of the localization length upon approaching the delocalized state is significantly different from equilibrium if disorder is introduced into the nondissipative part of the dynamics. This indicates a different type of nonequilibrium quantum critical universality class accessible in cold-atom experiments.