Robustness of many-body localization in the presence of dissipation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how many-body localization (MBL) persists under dissipation, revealing that while systems eventually thermalize, they do so very slowly, allowing non-ergodic behavior to be observed over long timescales.

Contribution

It demonstrates that MBL systems under dephasing exhibit logarithmically slow heating, extending the understanding of MBL robustness in open quantum systems.

Findings

Heating progresses logarithmically slowly under dephasing.

Signatures of non-ergodicity are observable over long transient times.

Potential experimental realization with cold atomic gases in optical lattices.

Abstract

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. Here we study heating and ergodicity for a paradigmatic MBL system---an interacting fermionic chain subject to quenched disorder---in the presence of dephasing. We find that, 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. We point out a potential controlled realization of the considered setup with cold atomic gases held in optical lattices.