Bridging the Gap Between Many-Body Localization and Quantum Spin Glasses

Sudip Mukherjee, Sabyasachi Nag, Arti Garg

Moumita Indra, Aarya Bothra, Arti Garg

Gianni Mossi, Antonello Scardicchio

By considering the quantum dynamics of a transverse field Ising spin glass on the Bethe lattice at large and small transverse fields we observe the appearance of a many body localized region. The region is located within the region in which the system, when in equilibrium, is a spin glass. Accordingly, we conjecture that quantum dynamics inside the glassy region is split in an MBL and a delocalized (but not necessarily ergodic) region.

Louk Rademaker, Dmitry A. Abanin

Spin glasses and many-body localization (MBL) are prime examples of ergodicity breaking, yet their physical origin is quite different: the former phase arises due to rugged classical energy landscape, while the latter is a quantum-interference effect. Here, we study quantum dynamics of an isolated 1D spin glass under application of a transverse field. At high energy densities, the system is ergodic, relaxing via a resonance avalanche mechanism, that is also responsible for the destruction of MBL in nonglassy systems with power-law interactions. At low energy densities, the interaction-induced fields obtain a power-law soft gap, making the resonance avalanche mechanism inefficient. This leads to the persistence of the spin-glass order, as demonstrated by resonance analysis and by numerical studies. A small fraction of resonant spins forms a thermalizing system with long-range entanglement, making this regime distinct from the conventional MBL. The model considered can be realized in systems of trapped ions, opening the door to investigating slow quantum dynamics induced by glassiness.

John Z Imbrie

Younes Javanmard, Soumya Bera, Markus Heyl

Many-body localized phases may not only be characterized by their ergodicity breaking, but can also host ordered phases such as the many-body localized spin-glass (MBL-SG). The MBL-SG is challenging to access in a dynamical measurement and therefore experimentally since the conventionally used Edwards-Anderson order parameter is a two-point correlation function in time. In this work, we show that many-body localized spin-glass order can also be detected from two-site reduced density matrices, which we use to construct an eigenstate spin-glass order parameter. We find that this eigenstate spin-glass order parameter captures spin-glass phases in random Ising chains both in many-body eigenstates as well as in the nonequilibrium dynamics from a local in time measurement. We discuss how our results can be used to observe MBL-SG order within current experiments in Rydberg atoms and trapped ion systems.