Local ergotropy dynamically witnesses many-body 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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.20002,
title = {Local ergotropy dynamically witnesses many-body localized phases},
author = {Francesco Formicola and Grazia Di Bello and Giulio De Filippis and Vittorio Cataudella and Donato Farina and Carmine Antonio Perroni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20002},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
6 pages, 4 figures, End Matter and Supplemental Material