Role of interactions in a dissipative many-body localized system

TL;DR

This paper investigates how interactions influence the relaxation dynamics in a dissipative many-body localized system, revealing a crossover from disorder-dominated to interaction-dominated regimes with distinct relaxation behaviors.

Contribution

It uncovers the role of interactions in the relaxation process of dissipative MBL systems, highlighting a crossover and proposing a nucleation-based explanation for the observed dynamics.

Findings

Crossover from disorder to interaction dominance in relaxation dynamics.

Change from stretched to compressed exponential decay of correlations.

Nucleation and growth model explains the strongly interacting regime.

Abstract

Recent experimental and theoretical efforts have focused on the effect of dissipation on quantum many-body systems in their many-body localized (MBL) phase. While in the presence of dephasing noise such systems reach a unique ergodic state, their dynamics is characterized by slow relaxation manifested in non-exponential decay of self-correlations. Here we shed light on a currently much debated issue, namely the role of interactions for this relaxation dynamics. We focus on the experimentally relevant situation of the evolution from an initial charge density wave in the presence of strong dephasing noise. We find a crossover from a regime dominated by disorder to a regime dominated by interactions, with a concomitant change of time correlators from stretched exponential to compressed exponential form. The strongly interacting regime can be explained in terms of nucleation and growth dynamics of relaxing regions - reminiscent of the kinetics of crystallization in soft matter systems - and should be observable experimentally. This interaction-driven crossover suggests that the competition between interactions and noise give rise to a much richer structure of the MBL phase than anticipated so far.