Dynamical Response of Many-Body Localized Systems

Kartiek Agarwal, Ehud Altman, Eugene Demler +3 more

The low‐frequency response of systems near the many‐body localization phase transition, on either side of the transition, is dominated by contributions from rare regions that are locally “in the other phase”, i.e., rare localized regions in a system that is typically thermal, or rare thermal regions in a system that is typically localized. Rare localized regions affect the properties of the thermal phase, especially in one dimension, by acting as bottlenecks for transport and the growth of entanglement, whereas rare thermal regions in the localized phase act as local “baths” and dominate the low‐frequency response of the MBL phase. We review recent progress in understanding these rare‐region effects, and discuss some of the open questions associated with them: in particular, whether and in what circumstances a single rare thermal region can destabilize the many‐body localized phase. image

Ang Yang, Zekai Chen, Yanliang Guo +3 more

François Huveneers

Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Michael Knap, Eugene Demler

We explore the response of many-body localized (MBL) systems to periodic driving of arbitrary amplitude, focusing on the rate at which they exchange energy with the drive. To this end, we introduce an infinite-temperature generalization of the effective ``heating rate'' in terms of the spread of a random walk in energy space. We compute this heating rate numerically and estimate it analytically in various regimes. When the drive amplitude is much smaller than the frequency, this effective heating rate is given by linear response theory with a coefficient that is proportional to the optical conductivity; in the opposite limit, the response is nonlinear and the heating rate is a nontrivial power law of time. We discuss the mechanisms underlying this crossover in the MBL phase. We comment on implications for the subdiffusive thermal phase near the MBL transition, and for response in imperfectly isolated MBL systems.

Sarang Gopalakrishnan, S. A. Parameswaran

Anirban Dutta, Subroto Mukerjee, K. Sengupta

We chart out the ground state phase diagram and demonstrate the presence of a many-body localized (MBL) phase for an experimentally realizable one-dimensional (1D) constrained dipole boson model in the presence of an Aubry-Andre (AA) potential whose strength ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{0}$ can be tuned to precipitate an ergodic-MBL transition. We discuss the signature of such a transition in the quantum dynamics of the model by computing its response subsequent to a sudden quench of ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{0}$. We show that the MBL and the ergodic phases can be clearly distinguished by study of post-quench dynamics and provide an estimate for minimal time up to which experiments need to track the response of the system to confirm the onset of the MBL phase. We suggest experiments which can test our theory.