# Dynamics of many-body localization in the presence of particle loss

## TL;DR

This paper explores how particle loss affects many-body localization in cold-atom systems, revealing that loss combined with interactions suppresses entanglement and alters the system's dynamics, with implications for experimental studies.

## Contribution

It introduces a symmetry-based method to analyze particle loss effects on many-body localization, extending understanding beyond dephasing to include particle loss in open quantum systems.

## Key findings

- Particle loss suppresses operator space entanglement entropy.
- Interactions combined with loss lead to dissipation and localization suppression.
- The method enables long-time analysis of pure and mixed states under loss.

## Abstract

At long times residual couplings to the environment become relevant even in the most isolated experiments, creating a crucial difficulty for the study of fundamental aspects of many-body dynamics. A particular example is many-body localization in a cold-atom setting, where incoherent photon scattering introduces both dephasing and particle loss. Whereas dephasing has been studied in detail and is known to destroy localization already on the level of non-interacting particles, the effect of particle loss is less well understood. A difficulty arises due to the `non-local' nature of the loss process, complicating standard numerical tools using matrix product decomposition. Utilizing symmetries of the Lindbladian dynamics, we investigate the particle loss on both the dynamics of observables, as well as the structure of the density matrix and the individual states. We find that particle loss in the presence of interactions leads to dissipation and a strong suppression of the (operator space) entanglement entropy. Our approach allows for the study of the interplay of dephasing and loss for pure and mixed initial states to long times, which is important for future experiments using controlled coupling of the environment.