Signatures of Many-Body Localization in a Controlled Open Quantum System

By H. Luschen, P. Bordia, S. Hodgman, Michael Schreiber, S. Sarkar, Andrew J. Daley, Mark H. Fischer, E. Altman, I. Bloch, U. Schneider. 2016

251 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the presence of disorder, an interacting closed quantum system can undergo many-body localization (MBL) and fail to thermalize. However, over long times, even weak couplings to any thermal environment will necessarily thermalize the system and erase all signatures of MBL. This presents a challenge for experimental investigations of MBL since no realistic system can ever be fully closed. In this work, we experimentally explore the thermalization dynamics of a localized system in the presence of controlled dissipation. Specifically, we find that photon scattering results in a stretched exponential decay of an initial density pattern with a rate that depends linearly on the scattering rate. We find that the resulting susceptibility increases significantly close to the phase transition point. In this regime, which is inaccessible to current numerical studies, we also find a strong dependence on interactions. Our work provides a basis for systematic studies of MBL in open systems and opens a route towards extrapolation of closed-system properties from experiments.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c79dbfb9e39f488a0d229d0ae8f00056e8cd3e3

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Subradiant states of quantum bits coupled to a one-dimensional waveguide (2018, background): “This combination of features suggests that waveguide QED systems should be an attractive platform to broadly explore many-body open quantum systems, whose properties have drawn significant interest in recent years [47–51].”
Probing Slow Relaxation and Many-Body Localization in Two-Dimensional Quasiperiodic Systems (2017, background): “us to experimentally access even longer timescales and understand the coupling to an external bath [26, 34, 38], as well as to probe the interplay between the spin and charge sectors arising from SU(2) symmetry [44], and plaquette resonances in two-dimensions [45].”
Colloquium : Many-body localization, thermalization, and entanglement (2018, background): “Measuring the susceptibility of any MBL phase to external couplings might therefore be a useful probe to distinguish between the two cases (Lüschen et al., 2017).”