Stability of electric-field-driven MBL in an interacting long range hopping model

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that many-body localization (MBL) remains stable in systems with long-range hopping under static and periodic electric fields, contrasting with other disordered models where MBL is typically destroyed by long-range interactions.

Contribution

It shows that MBL is robust against long-range hopping in electric-field-driven systems, both static and periodically driven, revealing new stability properties of MBL under these conditions.

Findings

MBL persists with long-range hopping in static electric fields.

High-frequency drives can induce MBL in ergodic phases.

Resonant drives can coherently destroy MBL.

Abstract

We study the fate of many-body localization (MBL) in the presence of long-range hopping ($\sim 1/r^{\sigma}$) in a system subjected to an electric field (static and time-periodic) along with a slowly-varying aperiodic potential. We show that the MBL in the static electric-field model is robust against arbitrary long-range hopping in sharp contrast to other disordered models, where MBL is killed by sufficiently long-range hopping. Next, we show that the drive-induced phenomena associated with an ac square wave electric field are also robust against long-range hopping. Specifically, we obtain drive-induced MBL, where a high-frequency drive can convert the ergodic phase into the MBL phase. Remarkably, we find that coherent destruction of MBL is also possible with the aid of a resonant drive. Thus in both the static and time-periodic square wave electric field models, the qualitative properties of the system are independent of whether the hopping is short-ranged or long-ranged.