Bath-induced decay of Stark many-body localization
arXiv:1903.07338 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.030602
Abstract
We investigate the relaxation dynamics of an interacting Stark-localized system coupled to a dephasing bath, and compare its behavior to the conventional disorder-induced many body localized system. Specifically, we study the dynamics of population imbalance between even and odd sites, and the growth of the von Neumann entropy. For a large potential gradient, the imbalance is found to decay on a time scale that grows quadratically with the Wannier-Stark tilt. For the non-interacting system, it shows an exponential decay, which becomes a stretched exponential decay in the presence of finite interactions. This is different from a system with disorder-induced localization, where the imbalance exhibits a stretched exponential decay also for vanishing interactions. As another clear qualitative difference, we do not find a logarithmically slow growth of the von-Neumann entropy as it is found for the disordered system. Our findings can immediately be tested experimentally with ultracold atoms in optical lattices.
References in corpus (11)
- Many body localization and thermalization in quantum statistical mechanics
- Many-body localization edge in the random-field Heisenberg chain
- Many body localization in Heisenberg XXZ magnet in a random field
- Phenomenology of fully many-body-localized systems
- Spectral signatures of many-body localization with interacting photons
- Constructing local integrals of motion in the many-body localized phase
- Signatures of Many-Body Localization in a Controlled Open Quantum System
- How a small quantum bath can thermalize long localized chains
- Non-equilibrium dynamics of bosonic atoms in optical lattices: Decoherence of many-body states due to spontaneous emission
- Dynamics in many-body localized quantum systems without disorder
- Possible experimental manifestations of the many-body localization