We study the dynamics of one- and two-dimensional disordered lattice bosons/fermions initialized to a Fock state with 1 particle on a set of lattice sites (
A) and 0 particles on the rest of the sites (
A). Such states have been considered in recent ultracold atomic experiments to detect many body localization. For noninteracting systems we establish a universal relation between the long time density imbalance between
A and
A sites, $I(\ensuremath{\infty})$, the localization length ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{l}$, and the geometry of the initial pattern. For the alternating initial pattern of 1 and 0 particles in one dimension, $I(\ensuremath{\infty})=tanh[a/{\ensuremath{\xi}}_{l}]$, where
a is the lattice spacing. For systems with mobility edge, we find analytic relations between $I(\ensuremath{\infty})$, the effective localization length ${\overline{\ensuremath{\xi}}}_{l}$, and the fraction of localized states
fl. The imbalance as a function of disorder shows nonanalytic behavior when the mobility edge passes through a band edge. For interacting bosonic systems, we show that there is a mechanism to retain a finite long-time imbalance in the system even in presence of dissipative and stochastic processes coming from interparticle scattering. The scattering of particles, which lead to a decay of the memory of initial conditions through dissipative processes, also creates excitations in the system. For strong disorder, the excitations act as a local bath, whose noise correlators retain information of the initial pattern. This sustains a finite imbalance at long times in strongly disordered interacting systems.
We investigate the non-equilibrium dynamics of the disordered one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model with a focus on many-body localization. The system is initialized in a charge-density-wave-state, and its time evolution is analyzed through sublattice imbalance (spin and charge), and bipartite entanglement entropy. A clear crossover from ergodic to non-ergodic behavior is observed with increasing disorder strength. In the weak disorder regime, rapid decay of imbalance and the fast growth of entanglement indicate efficient thermalization. In contrast, a strong disorder leads to persistent imbalance and slow dynamics, signaling the breakdown of ergodicity. The charge and spin sectors exhibit distinct relaxation behavior, providing evidence for partial decoupling between these degrees of freedom. Furthermore, in the interacting regime, the entanglement entropy shows slow logarithmic growth, reflecting the dephasing-driven dynamics characteristic of the many-body localized phase. These results highlight the interplay between disorder and interactions in determining the dynamical properties of the system and establish robust signatures of many-body localization in the Fermi-Hubbard model.
We study many-body localization (MBL) in a one-dimensional system of spinless fermions with a deterministic aperiodic potential in the presence of random interactions
Vij decaying as power-law ${V}_{ij}/{({r}_{ij})}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ with distance
rij. We demonstrate that MBL survives even for $\ensuremath{\alpha}<1$ and is preceded by a broad nonergodic subdiffusive phase. Starting from parameters at which the short-range interacting system shows an infinite temperature MBL phase, turning on random power-law interactions results in many-body mobility edges in the spectrum with a larger fraction of ergodic delocalized states for smaller values of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. Hence, the critical disorder
hcr, at which ergodic to nonergodic transition takes place, increases with the range of interactions. Time evolution of the density imbalance
I(t), which has power-law decay $I(t)\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\gamma}}$ in the intermediate to large time regime, shows that the critical disorder
hcI, above which the system becomes diffusionless (with $\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\sim}0$) and transits into the MBL phase, is much larger than
hcr. In between
hcr and
hcI there is a broad nonergodic subdiffusive phase, which is characterized by the Poissonian statistics for the level spacing ratio, multifractal eigenfunctions, and a nonzero dynamical exponent $\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\ll}1/2$. The system continues to be subdiffusive even on the ergodic side (
h<hcr) of the MBL transition, where the eigenstates near the mobility edges are multifractal. For
h<h0<hcr, the system is superdiffusive with $\ensuremath{\gamma}>1/2$. The rich phase diagram obtained here is unique to the random nature of long-range interactions. We explain this in terms of the enhanced correlations among local energies of the effective Anderson model induced by random power-law interactions.
We investigate dynamics of a single mobile impurity immersed in a bath of Anderson localized particles and focus on the regime of relatively strong disorder and interactions. In that regime, the dynamics of the system is particularly slow, suggesting, at short times, an occurrence of many-body localization. Considering longer timescales, we show that the latter is a transient effect and that, eventually, the impurity spreads subdiffusively and induces a gradual delocalization of the Anderson insulator. The phenomenology of the system in the considered regime of slow dynamics includes a subdiffusive growth of mean square displacement of the impurity, power-law decay of density correlation functions of the Anderson insulator, and a power-law growth of entanglement entropy in the system. We observe a similar regime of slow dynamics also when the disorder in the system is replaced by a sufficiently strong quasiperiodic potential.
We study many-body localization for a disordered chain of spin-1/2 fermions. When both down and up components are exposed to the same strong disorder, a power-law growth of the entanglement entropy was observed [P. Prelov\ifmmode \check{s}\else \v{s}\fi{}ek et al., Phys. Rev. B 94, 241104 (2016)] that suggests that many-body localization is not complete; the density (charge) degree of freedom is localized, while the spin degree of freedom is apparently delocalized. We show that this powerlike behavior is only a transient effect and that, for longer times, the growth of the entanglement entropy is logarithmic in time. At the same time, the decay of the spin correlation slows down, showing that the spin transport is strongly reduced at long times. The dynamics of the system is quite similar to the one of many-body localized systems. Because of the limited duration of the numerical experiment, it is not possible to determine whether the system is truly many-body localized or diffusing very slowly at long times.
Many-body localization is characterized by a slow logarithmic growth of the entanglement entropy after a global quantum quench while the local memory of an initial density imbalance remains at infinite time. We investigate how much the proximity of a many-body localized phase can influence the dynamics in the delocalized ergodic regime where thermalization is expected. Using an exact Krylov space technique, the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the random-field Heisenberg chain is studied up to
L=28 sites, starting from an initially unentangled high-energy product state. Within most of the delocalized phase, we find a sub-ballistic entanglement growth $S(t)\ensuremath{\propto}{t}^{1/z}$ with a disorder-dependent exponent $z\ensuremath{\ge}1$, in contrast with the pure ballistic growth
z=1 of clean systems. At the same time, anomalous relaxation is also observed for the spin imbalance $\mathcal{I}(t)\ensuremath{\propto}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\zeta}}$ with a continuously varying disorder-dependent exponent $\ensuremath{\zeta}$, vanishing at the transition. This provides a clear experimental signature for detecting this nonconventional regime.