Nucleation of ergodicity by a single mobile impurity in supercooled insulators

Abstract

We consider a disordered Hubbard model, and show that, at sufficiently weak disorder, a single spin-down mobile impurity can thermalize an extensive initially localized system of spin-up particles. Thermalization is enabled by resonant processes which involve correlated hops of the impurity and localized particles. This effect indicates that certain localized insulators behave as "supercooled" systems, with mobile impurities acting as ergodic seeds. We provide analytical estimates, supported by numerical exact diagonalization (ED), showing how the critical disorder strength for such mechanism depends on the particle density of the localized system. In the $U\to \infty$ limit, doublons are stable excitations, and they can thermalize mesoscopic systems by a similar mechanism. The emergence of an additional conservation law leads to an eventual localization of doublons. Our predictions apply to fermionic and bosonic systems and are readily accessible in ongoing experiments simulating synthetic quantum lattices with tunable disorder.

arXiv comment5 pages + supplementary material (8 pages)

References in corpus (35)

• Chaos and Quantum Thermalization
• Nonequilibrium dynamics of closed interacting quantum systems
• Metal-insulator transition in a weakly interacting many-electron system with localized single-particle states
• Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
• Many-body localization, thermalization, and entanglement
• Observation of many-body localization of interacting fermions in a quasi-random optical lattice
• Unbounded growth of entanglement in models of many-body localization
• The distribution of the ratio of consecutive level spacings in random matrix ensembles
• Exploring the many-body localization transition in two dimensions
• Many body localization in Heisenberg XXZ magnet in a random field
• Interacting electrons in disordered wires: Anderson localization and low-temperature transport
• Phenomenology of fully many-body-localized systems
• A phenomenology of certain many-body-localized systems
• Local conservation laws and the structure of the many-body localized states
• On Many-Body Localization for Quantum Spin Chains
• Universal slow growth of entanglement in interacting strongly disordered systems
• The approach to thermal equilibrium in quantized chaotic systems
• Probing entanglement in a many-body-localized system
• Spectral signatures of many-body localization with interacting photons
• Spin and Charge Resolved Quantum Gas Microscopy of Antiferromagnetic Order in Hubbard Chains
• Stability and instability towards delocalization in MBL systems
• Theory of the many-body localization transition in one dimensional systems
• Universal properties of many-body delocalization transitions
• Observation of Elastic Doublon Decay in the Fermi-Hubbard Model
• How a small quantum bath can thermalize long localized chains
• Finite temperature phase transition for disordered weakly interacting bosons in one dimension
• Quantum quenches in the many-body localized phase
• Analytically solvable renormalization group for the many-body localization transition
• Metastable superfluidity of repulsive fermionic atoms in optical lattices
• Many-body delocalization in the presence of a quantum bath
• Avalanche induced co-existing localised and thermal regions in disordered chains
• Doublon dynamics in the extended Fermi Hubbard model
• Are many-body localized systems stable in the presence of a small bath?
• Finite-Temperature Fluid-Insulator Transition of Strongly Interacting 1D Disordered Bosons
• Variational Schrieffer-Wolff Transformations for Quantum Many-Body Dynamics

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Many-Body Localization in the Age of Classical Computing
• Propagation of Many-body Localization in an Anderson Insulator
• Slow dynamics of a mobile impurity interacting with an Anderson insulator
• Localization of a mobile impurity interacting with an Anderson insulator
• Fermionic Magic Resources of Quantum Many-Body Systems
• Many-body localization proximity effect in two-species bosonic Hubbard model
• Many-body localization of 1D disordered impenetrable two-component fermions
• Canonical density matrices from eigenstates of mixed systems
• Nonergodic dynamics for an impurity interacting with bosons in tilted lattice
• Disordered impenetrable two-component fermions in one dimension
• Scaling Theory of Few-Particle Delocalization
• Many-body localization and particle multioccupancy in the disordered Bose-Hubbard model
• Charge carrier relaxation dynamics in the one-dimensional Kondo lattice model