EPFL seminars

Possible many-body localization in the dynamics of correlated systems

by Federico Becca (SISSA Trieste)

Europe/Zurich
EPFL, 727 du BSP (EPFL)

EPFL, 727 du BSP

EPFL

Description
When classical systems fail to explore their entire configurational space, intriguing macroscopic phenomena like aging and glass formation may emerge. Also closed quanto-mechanical systems may stop wandering freely around the whole Hilbert space, even if they are initially prepared into a macroscopically large combination of eigenstates. Here, we report numerical evidences that the dynamics of strongly interacting lattice bosons driven sufficiently far from equilibrium can be trapped into extremely long-lived inhomogeneous metastable states. The slowing down of incoherent density excitations above a threshold energy, much reminiscent of a dynamical arrest on the verge of a glass transition, is identified as the key feature of this phenomenon.
We argue that the resulting long-lived inhomogeneous pattern is in turn responsible for the lack of thermalization observed in large finite size systems. Such a rich phenomenology could be experimentally uncovered upon probing the out-ofequilibrium dynamics of conveniently prepared quantum states of trapped cold atoms which we hereby suggest.[1]