Localization and slow-thermalization in a cluster spin model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel cluster spin model with disorder that exhibits extensive local integrals of motion, preventing thermalization and enabling explicit state labeling, with implications for understanding many-body localization and topological order.

Contribution

The work presents a new cluster spin model with compact-support LIOMs that maintain integrability and prevent thermalization, even with interactions, and explores the effects of symmetry-protected-topological order.

Findings

Existence of compact-support LIOMs for any interaction strength

Prevention of thermalization and entanglement spreading

Emergence of MBL-like behavior and preserved topological order

Abstract

Novel cluster spin model with interactions and disorder is introduced and studied. In specific type of interactions, we find an extensive number of local integrals of motion (LIOMs), which are a modified version of the stabilizers in quantum information, i.e., mutually commuting operators specifying all quantum states in the system. These LIOMs can be defined for any strength of the interactions and disorder, and are of compact-support instead of exponentially-decaying tail. Hence, even under the presence of interactions, integrability is held, and all energy eigenstates are labeled by these LIOMs and can be explicitly obtained. Integrable dynamics is, then, expected to occur. The compact-support nature of the LIOMs crucially prevents the thermalization and entanglement spreading. We numerically investigate dynamics of the system governed by the existence of the compact-support LIOMs, and clarify the effects of additional interactions, which break the compact-support nature of the LIOMs. There, we find that the ordinary MBL behaviors emerge, such as the logarithmic growth of the entanglement entropy in the time evolution. Besides the ergodicity breaking dynamic, we find that symmetry-protected-topological order preserves for specific states even in the presence of the interactions.