Related papers: Many-body energy localization transition in period…
We examine what happens when a strongly many body localized system is coupled to a weak heat bath, with both system and bath containing similar numbers of degrees of freedom. Previous investigations of localized systems coupled to baths…
Contrary to a driven classical system that exhibits chaos phenomena and diffusive energy growth, a driven quantum system can exhibit dynamical localization that features energy saturation. However, the evolution of the dynamically localized…
A generic closed quantum many-body system will inevitably tend to thermalization, whose local information encoded in the initial state eventually scrambles into the full space, known as quantum ergodicity. A paradigmatic exception in closed…
Quasiperiodic systems in one dimension can host non-ergodic states, e.g. localized in position or momentum. Periodic quenches within localized phases yield Floquet eigenstates of the same nature, i.e. spatially localized or ballistic.…
Understanding the microscopic mechanisms of thermalization in closed quantum systems is among the key challenges in modern quantum many-body physics. We demonstrate a method to probe local thermalization in a large-scale many-body system by…
We improve on our version of the second law of thermodynamics as a deterministic theorem for quantum spin systems in two basic aspects. The first concerns the general statement of the second law: spontaneous changes in an adiabatically…
Small nonequilibrium systems in contact with a heat bath can be analyzed with the framework of stochastic thermodynamics. In such systems, fluctuations, which are not negligible, follow universal relations such as the fluctuation theorem.…
A microscopic definition of the thermodynamic entropy in an isolated quantum system must satisfy (i) additivity, (ii) extensivity and (iii) the second law of thermodynamics. We show that the diagonal entropy, which is the Shannon entropy in…
We observe the emergence of a disorder-induced insulating state in a strongly interacting atomic Fermi gas trapped in an optical lattice. This closed quantum system free of a thermal reservoir realizes the disordered Fermi-Hubbard model,…
A recent experiment [Nature Physics 10, 1 (2019)] has realized a dynamical gauge system with $\mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge symmetry in a double-well potential. In this work we propose a method to generalize this model from a single double well to a…
Periodic drives are a common tool to control physical systems, but have a limited applicability because time-dependent drives generically lead to heating. How to prevent the heating is a fundamental question with important practical…
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy production in macroscopic systems is non-negative, reaching zero only at thermodynamic equilibrium. As a corollary, this implies that the state trajectory of macroscopic systems is…
Driven quantum systems may realize novel phenomena absent in static systems, but driving-induced heating can limit the time-scale on which these persist. We study heating in interacting quantum many-body systems driven by random sequences…
Due to a phenomenon of many-body localization (MBL), the strong disorder may significantly slow down or even completely hinder the thermalization of quantum many-body systems. A sufficiently deep quasiperiodic potential may also inhibit…
The optimization of the conversion of thermal energy into work and the minimization of dissipation for nano- and mesoscopic systems is a complex challenge because of the important role fluctuations play on the dynamics of small systems. We…
Prethermalization refers to the transient phenomenon where a system thermalizes according to a Hamiltonian that is not the generator of its evolution. We provide here a rigorous framework for quantum spin systems where prethermalization is…
Closed quantum systems with quenched randomness exhibit many-body localized regimes wherein they do not equilibrate even though prepared with macroscopic amounts of energy above their ground states. We show that such localized systems can…
In this sequel (to [Phys. Rev. Res. 3, 023044(2021)], arXiv:2006.10072), we study randomly driven $(1+1)$ dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), a family of quantum many-body systems with soluble non-equilibrium quantum dynamics. The…
We present an introductory review of nonergodic dynamics in interacting many-body quantum systems, focusing on the phenomenon of many-body localization (MBL). We describe aspects of MBL and summarize the evidence for a crossover from the…
Previously derived "global" thermodynamic speed limit theorems state that increasing the maximum speed with which a system can evolve between two given probability distributions over its states requires the system to produce more entropy in…