Quench dynamics of one-dimensional interacting bosons in a disordered potential: Elastic dephasing and critical speeding-up of thermalization

Abstract

The dynamics of interacting bosons in one dimension following the sudden switching on of a weak disordered potential is investigated. On time scales before quasiparticles scatter (prethermalized regime), the dephasing from random elastic forward scattering causes all correlations to decay exponentially fast, but the system remains far from thermal equilibrium. For longer times, the combined effect of disorder and interactions gives rise to inelastic scattering and to thermalization. A novel quantum kinetic equation accounting for both disorder and interactions is employed to study the dynamics. Thermalization turns out to be most effective close to the superfluid-Bose glass critical point where nonlinearities become more and more important. The numerically obtained thermalization times are found to agree well with analytic estimates.

10 pages, 3 figures, published version

References in corpus (9)

• Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
• Fermi-liquid instabilities at magnetic quantum phase transitions
• Direct observation of Anderson localization of matter-waves in a controlled disorder
• The Luttinger model following a sudden interaction switch-on
• Interaction Quench in the Hubbard model
• The quasi-periodic Bose-Hubbard model and localization in one-dimensional cold atomic gases
• Exploring local quantum many-body relaxation by atoms in optical superlattices
• Phase transition of one dimensional bosons with strong disorder
• Phase transition of interacting disordered bosons in one dimension

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Low-frequency behavior of off-diagonal matrix elements in the integrable XXZ chain and in a locally perturbed quantum-chaotic XXZ chain
• Typicality of Prethermalization