Screening the Coulomb interaction leads to a prethermal regime in two-dimensional bad conductors

TL;DR

This study explores how the range of Coulomb interactions influences thermalization and localization in disordered two-dimensional electron systems, revealing a prethermal regime for certain interaction exponents.

Contribution

It demonstrates that power-law interactions with different exponents lead to distinct dynamical regimes, including many-body localization-like behavior in 2D electron systems.

Findings

Prethermal MBL-like dynamics observed for $oldsymbol{eta=3}$.

System thermalizes for $oldsymbol{eta=1}$, with glassy dynamics.

Closer to thermodynamic limit than previous synthetic quantum systems.

Abstract

The absence of thermalization in certain isolated many-body systems is of great fundamental interest. Many-body localization (MBL) is a widely studied mechanism for thermalization to fail in strongly disordered quantum systems, but it is still not understood precisely how the range of interactions affects the dynamical behavior and the existence of MBL, especially in dimensions $D>1$. By investigating nonequilibrium dynamics in strongly disordered $D=2$ electron systems with power-law interactions $\propto 1/r^{\alpha}$ and poor coupling to a thermal bath, here we observe MBL-like, prethermal dynamics for $\alpha=3$. In contrast, for $\alpha=1$, the system thermalizes, although the dynamics is glassy. Our results provide important insights for theory, especially since we obtained them on systems that are much closer to the thermodynamic limit than synthetic quantum systems employed in previous studies of MBL. Thus, our work is a key step towards further studies of ergodicity breaking and quantum entanglement in real materials.