Activities

  1. avalanches and many-body resonances in many-body localized systems

Alan Morningstar

Princeton University, USA

3 March 2022 Thu 10 am

                                      IBS Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems (PCS), Administrative Office (B349), Theory Wing, 3rd floor

                                      Expo-ro 55, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, South Korea, 34126 Tel: +82-42-878-8633                     

Disordered, interacting, isolated, highly excited quantum spin chains can fail to reach thermal equilibrium due to a phenomenon called many-body localization (MBL). In asymptotically large systems, the onset of MBL occurs at an unconventional phase transition, where a very large system goes from extremely slow but complete thermalization, to failing to thermalize altogether. However the universal properties of that asymptotic transition do not appear to be accessible to numerical or experimental study, and in realistic finite-size systems the onset of MBL occurs over a broader crossover. I’ll present recent work [arXiv:2107.05642] on (1) studying a proposed mechanism driving the asymptotic transition using accessible small-system numerics, (2) characterizing the rare long- range many-body resonances that turn on/off throughout the crossover.