Thermalization of Strongly Disordered Nonlinear Chains

TL;DR

This paper investigates how correlations in disorder potentials affect the thermalization process in strongly disordered nonlinear chains, revealing that correlations facilitate thermalization and lead to a grand canonical distribution.

Contribution

It demonstrates that introducing correlations in the disorder potential enhances thermalization in strongly disordered nonlinear chains, a novel insight into disorder effects.

Findings

Correlated disorder accelerates thermalization.

Thermalized states follow grand canonical distribution.

Disorder correlations influence localization and dynamics.

Abstract

Thermalization of systems described by the discrete non-linear Schr\"odinger equation, in the strong disorder limit, is investigated both theoretically and numerically. We show that introducing correlations in the disorder potential, while keeping the "effective" disorder fixed (as measured by the localization properties of wavepacket dynamics), strongly facilitate the thermalization process and lead to a standard grand canonical distribution of the probability norms associated to each site