Many-body localization dynamics from gauge invariance

Abstract

We show how lattice gauge theories can display many-body localization dynamics in the absence of disorder. Our starting point is the observation that, for some generic translationally invariant states, Gauss law effectively induces a dynamics which can be described as a disorder average over gauge super-selection sectors. We carry out extensive exact simulations on the real-time dynamics of a lattice Schwinger model, describing the coupling between U(1) gauge fields and staggered fermions. Our results show how memory effects and slow entanglement growth are present in a broad regime of parameters - in particular, for sufficiently large interactions. These findings are immediately relevant to cold atoms and trapped ions experiments realizing dynamical gauge fields, and suggest a new and universal link between confinement and entanglement dynamics in the many-body localized phase of lattice models.

5Pages + appendices; V2: updated discussion in page 2, more numerical results, added references

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Robustness of delocalization to the inclusion of soft constraints in long-range random models
• Perturbation theory approaches to Anderson and Many-Body Localization: some lecture notes