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Many-body localization in open quantum systems

Daniele Nello

Published Jul 28, 2020• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

We consider a spin chain coupled to a bath of harmonic oscillators. We will use the bosonization for the spins and treat the bath in the Caldeira-Legget framework. Our goal is to compute transport properties and see if the bath can induce localization in the spin chain.

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We study an incommensurate XXZ spin chain coupled to a collection of local harmonic baths. At zero temperature, by varying the strength of the coupling to the bath the chain undergoes a quantum phase transition between a Luttinger liquid phase and a spin-density wave (SDW). Our results are consistent with the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition. As opposed to the standard mechanism, the SDW emerges in the absence of the opening of a gap, but it is due to ``fractional excitations'' induced by the bath. We also show, by computing the DC conductivity, that the system is insulating in the presence of a subohmic bath. We interpret this phenomenon as localization induced by the bath \`a la Caldeira and Leggett.
We study an XXZ spin chain, where each spin is coupled to an independent ohmic bath of harmonic oscillators at zero temperature. Using bosonization and numerical techniques, we show the existence of two phases separated by a Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. At low coupling with the bath, the chain remains in a Luttinger liquid (LL) phase with a reduced but finite spin stiffness, while above a critical coupling, the system is in a dissipative phase characterized by a vanishing spin stiffness. We argue that the transport properties are also inhibited: The LL is a perfect conductor, while the dissipative phase displays finite resistivity. Our results show that the effect of the bath can be interpreted as annealed disorder-inducing signatures of localization.
We introduce a general but simple relation between the timescale for quantum coherence loss and the initial fluctuations of operators that couple a quantum system with a surrounding bath. The relation allows the prediction and measurement of early time decoherence dynamics for any open quantum system, through purity, without reconstructing the system's many-body density matrix. It is applied to predict the decoherence time for basic models-the Holstein chain, spin-boson and Caldeira-Legget models-commonly employed to capture electronic, vibrational, and vibronic dynamics in molecules. Such development also offers a practical platform to test the ability of approximate quantum dynamics methods to capture decoherence. In particular, a class of mixed quantum-classical schemes for molecular dynamics where the bath is treated classically, such as Ehrenfest dynamics, are shown to correctly capture short-time decoherence when the initial conditions are sampled from the Wigner distribution. These advances provide a useful platform to develop decoherence times for molecular processes and to test approximate molecular dynamics methods.