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Probing the onset of quantum avalanches in a many-body localized system

Nature Physics volume 19, pages 481–485 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Strongly correlated systems can exhibit unexpected phenomena when brought in a state far from equilibrium. An example is many-body localization, which prevents generic interacting systems from reaching thermal equilibrium even at long times1,2. The stability of the many-body localized phase has been predicted to be hindered by the presence of small thermal inclusions that act as a bath, leading to the delocalization of the entire system through an avalanche propagation mechanism3,4,5,6,7,8. Here we study the dynamics of a thermal inclusion of variable size when it is coupled to a many-body localized system. We find evidence for accelerated transport of thermal inclusion into the localized region. We monitor how the avalanche spreads through the localized system and thermalizes it site by site by measuring the site-resolved entropy over time. Furthermore, we isolate the strongly correlated bath-induced dynamics with multipoint correlations between the bath and the system. Our results have implications on the robustness of many-body localized systems and their critical behaviour.

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Fig. 1: Bath-induced quantum avalanches.
Fig. 2: Accelerated transport across the clean–disorder interface.
Fig. 3: Site-resolved thermalization dynamics.
Fig. 4: Bath-induced many-body correlations.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge fruitful discussions with K. Agarwal, V. Khemani, M. Knap, M. Lebrat and J. Marino. We are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundations EPiQS Initiative, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research MURI program, an Army Research Office MURI program, the Swiss National Science Foundation (J.L.) and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (S.K.). The Flatiron Institute is a division of the Simons Foundation. D.S. is supported by the AFOSR grant FA9550-21-1-0236 and NSF grant OAC-2118310.

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Author notes

  1. Julian Léonard

    Present address: Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology, Atominstitut, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

  2. These authors contributed equally: Julian Léonard, Sooshin Kim.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Julian Léonard, Sooshin Kim, Matthew Rispoli, Alexander Lukin, Robert Schittko, Joyce Kwan & Markus Greiner

  2. Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Eugene Demler

  3. Center for Computational Quantum Physics, Flatiron Institute, New York, NY, USA

    Dries Sels

  4. Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Dries Sels

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Contributions

J.L., S.K., M.R., A.L., R.S. and J.K. contributed to conducting the experiment, and collecting and analysing the data. S.K. performed the numerical simulations. The theoretical concepts were developed together with D.S. and E.D. M.G. supervised the work. All the authors contributed to writing the manuscript and discussions.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Markus Greiner.

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M.G. is co-founder and shareholder of QuEra Computing. All other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Physics thanks Giovanni Modugno and the other, anonymous, reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–5, Table 1 and discussion.

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Léonard, J., Kim, S., Rispoli, M. et al. Probing the onset of quantum avalanches in a many-body localized system. Nat. Phys. 19, 481–485 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01887-3

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