Non-thermal dynamics in a spin-1/2 lattice Schwinger model

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a spin-1/2 lattice Schwinger model can exhibit disorder-free many-body localization and entropy prethermalization by introducing four-fermion interactions, revealing non-thermal dynamics due to gauge symmetry effects.

Contribution

It shows that adding four-fermion interactions enables disorder-free MBL in a spin-1/2 LSM, a phenomenon previously thought limited to high-spin models.

Findings

Observation of disorder-free MBL in spin-1/2 LSM

Entropy prethermalization in the model

Anomalous long-time behavior of observables

Abstract

Local gauge symmetry is intriguing for the study of quantum thermalization breaking. For example, in the high-spin lattice Schwinger model (LSM), the local U(1) gauge symmetry underlies the disorder-free many-body localization (MBL) dynamics of matter fields. This mechanism, however, would not work in a spin-1/2 LSM due to the absence of electric energy in the Hamiltonian. In this paper, we show that the spin-1/2 LSM can also exhibit disorder-free MBL dynamics, as well as entropy prethermalization, by introducing a four-fermion interaction into the system. The interplay between the fermion interaction and U(1) gauge symmetry endows the gauge fields with an effectively disordered potential which is responsible for the thermalization breaking. It induces anomalous (i.e., non-thermal) behaviors in the long-time evolution of such quantities as local observables, entanglement entropy, and correlation functions. Our work offers a new platform to explore emergent non-thermal dynamics in state-of-the-art quantum simulators with gauge symmetries.