Local ergotropy dynamically witnesses many-body localized phases

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that local ergotropy, the maximum work extractable from a small subsystem, can dynamically indicate the transition between ergodic and many-body localized phases in disordered quantum systems, offering a thermodynamic marker of localization.

Contribution

It introduces local ergotropy as a novel dynamical witness for many-body localization, linking thermodynamic work extraction to quantum phase characterization.

Findings

Local ergotropy exhibits logarithmic growth in the MBL phase.

Quantum fluctuations of ergotropy also follow a logarithmic law.

Local ergotropy effectively distinguishes between ergodic and localized phases.

Abstract

Many-body localization is a dynamical phenomenon characteristic of strongly interacting and disordered many-body quantum systems which fail to achieve thermal equilibrium. From a quantum information perspective, the fingerprint of this phenomenon is the logarithmic growth of the entanglement entropy over time. We perform intensive numerical simulations, applied to a paradigmatic model system, showing that the local ergotropy, the maximum extractable work via local unitary operations on a small subsystem in the presence of Hamiltonian coupling, dynamically witnesses the change from ergodic to localized phases. Within the many-body localized phase, both the local ergotropy and its quantum fluctuations slowly vary over time with a characteristic logarithmic law analogous to the behaviour of entanglement entropy. This showcases how directly leveraging local control, instead of local observables or entropies analyzed in previous works, provides a thermodynamic marker of localization phenomena based on the locally extractable work.