Hannover 2016 – scientific programme
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A: Fachverband Atomphysik
A 23: Ultra-cold atoms, ions and BEC I (with Q)
A 23.3: Talk
Wednesday, March 2, 2016, 11:30–11:45, f107
Robustness of many-body localization in the presence of dissipation — •Emanuele Levi1, Markus Heyl2, Igor Lesanovsky1, and Juan P. Garrahan1 — 1School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, University Park, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom — 2Physik Department, Technische Universität München, 85747 Garching, German
Many-body localization (MBL) has emerged as a novel paradigm for robust ergodicity breaking in
closed quantum many-body systems. However, it is not yet clear to which extent MBL survives in the presence of dissipative processes induced by the coupling to an environment. In this talk I will discuss the findings of [1] about heating and ergodicity for a paradigmatic MBL system –an interacting fermionic chain subject to quenched disorder in the presence of dephasing. Even though the system is eventually driven into an infinite-temperature state, heating as monitored by the von Neumann entropy can progress logarithmically slowly, implying exponentially large time scales for relaxation. This slow loss of memory of initial conditions make signatures of non-ergodicity visible over a long, but transient,
time regime. Time allowing I will discuss a potential controlled realization of the considered setup with cold atomic gases held in optical lattices.
[1] E. Levi, M. Heyl, I. Lesanovsky, J.P. Garrahan, What survives of many-body localization in the presence of dissipation, arXiv:1510.04634