Regimes of heating and dynamical response in driven many-body localized systems
Abstract
We explore the response of many-body localized (MBL) systems to periodic driving of arbitrary amplitude, focusing on the rate at which they exchange energy with the drive. To this end, we introduce an infinite-temperature generalization of the effective "heating rate" in terms of the spread of a random walk in energy space. We compute this heating rate numerically and estimate it analytically in various regimes. When the drive amplitude is much smaller than the frequency, this effective heating rate is given by linear response theory with a coefficient that is proportional to the optical conductivity; in the opposite limit, the response is nonlinear and the heating rate is a nontrivial power law of time. We discuss the mechanisms underlying this crossover in the MBL phase. We comment on implications for the subdiffusive thermal phase near the MBL transition, and for response in imperfectly isolated MBL systems.
Additional Information
© 2016 American Physical Society. Received 7 April 2016; published 14 September 2016. We thank D. Abanin, I. Bloch, P. Bordia, B. DeMarco, M. Heyl, D. Huse, H. Lüschen, I. Martin, R. Nandkishore, V. Oganesyan, S. Parameswaran, F. Pollmann, and U. Schneider for helpful discussions. We thank D. Huse for a critical reading of the manuscript. S.G. acknowledges financial support from the Walter Burke Institute at Caltech and from the National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF PHY11-25915. M.K. acknowledges financial support from Technical University of Munich-Institute for Advanced Study, funded by the German Excellence Initiative and the European Union FP7 under Grant Agreement No. 291763. E.D. acknowledges support from the Harvard-MIT CUA, NSF Grant No. DMR-1308435, AFOSR Quantum Simulation MURI, the ARO-MURI on Atomtronics, ARO MURI Quism program, the Simons foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, Dr. M. Rössler, the Walter Haefner Foundation, and the ETH Foundation.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevB.94.094201.pdf
Submitted - 1603.04448v2.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 70634
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20160928-104119094
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Caltech
- NSF
- PHY11-25915
- Technical University of Munich
- European Union FP7
- 291763
- Harvard-MIT CUA
- NSF
- DMR-1308435
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)
- Simons Foundation
- Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
- Dr. M. Rössler
- Walter Haefner Foundation
- ETH Foundation
- Army Research Office (ARO)
- Created
-
2016-09-28Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics