SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Ishita Modak

Publications and source records attributed to Ishita Modak.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Fock space fragmentation in quenches of disordered interacting fermions

Hilbert space fragmentation, as it is currently investigated, primarily originates from specific kinematic constraints or emergent conservation laws in many-body systems with translation invariance. It leads to non-ergodic dynamics and possible breakdown of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Here, we demonstrate that also in disordered systems, such as the XXZ model with random on-site fields, fragmentation appears as a natural concept offering fresh perspectives, for example, on many-body delocalization (MBdL). Specifically, we split the Fock-space into subspaces, potential-energy shells, which contain the accessible phase space for the relaxation of a quenched initial state. In this construction, dynamical observables reflect properties of the shell geometry, e.g., the drastic sample-to-sample fluctuations observed in the weak disorder regime, $W W_c$, the potential-energy shell decays into fragments; we argue that, unlike percolation, fragmentation is a strong-coupling scenario with turn-around flow: $W_c(L)$ diverges with increasing system size. We conjecture that the slowing down of the relaxation dynamics reported in traditional MBdL studies is (essentially) a manifestation of Fock-space fragmentation introduced here.

cond-mat.dis-nn

Inhomogeneous Floquet thermalization

How a closed system thermalizes, especially in the absence of global conservation laws but in the presence of disorder and interactions, is one of the central questions in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. We explore this for a disordered, periodically driven Ising chain. Our numerical results reveal inhomogeneous thermalization leading to a distribution of thermalization timescales within a single disordered sample, which we encode via a distribution of effective local temperatures. Using this, we find an excellent collapse $\textit{without}$ $\textit{any}$ $\textit{fitting}$ $\textit{parameters}$ of the local relaxation dynamics for the entire range of disorder values in the ergodic regime when adapting the disorder-averaged diagonal entanglement entropy as internal `time' of the system. This approach evidences a remarkably uniform parametrization of the dynamical many-body evolution of local temperature within the otherwise highly heterogeneous ergodic regime, independent of the strength of the disorder.

cond-mat.dis-nn

The internal clock of many-body delocalization

After a decade of many claims to the opposite, there now is a growing consensus that generic disordered quantum wires, e.g. the XXZ-Heisenberg chain, do not exhibit many-body localization (MBL) - at least not in a strict sense within a reasonable window of disorder values $W$. Specifically, computational studies of short wires exhibit an extremely slow but unmistakable flow of physical observables with increasing time and system size (``creep") that is consistently directed away from (strict) localization. Our work sheds fresh light on delocalization physics: Strong sample-to-sample fluctuations indicate the absence of a generic time scale, i.e. of a naive ``clock rate"; however, the concept of an ``internal clock" survives, at least in an ensemble sense. Specifically, we investigate the relaxation of the imbalance $\mathcal{I}(t)$ and its temporal fluctuations $\mathcal{F}(t)$, the entanglement and Renyi entropies, $\mathcal{S}_{\mathrm{e}}(t)$ and $ \mathcal{S}_2(t)$, in a 1D system of interacting disordered fermions. We observe that adopting $\mathcal{S}_{\mathrm{e}}(t), \mathcal{S}_2(t)$ as a measure for the internal time per sample reduces the sample-to-sample fluctuations but does not eliminate them. However, a (nearly) perfect collapse of the average $\overline{\mathcal{I}}(t)$ and $\overline{\mathcal{F}}(t)$ for different $W$ is obtained when plotted against $\overline{\mathcal{S}}_{\mathrm{e}}(t)$ or $\overline{\mathcal{S}}_2(t)$, indicating that the average entropy appropriately models the ensemble-averaged internal clock. We take the tendency for faster-than-logarithmic growth of $\overline{\mathcal{S}}_{\mathrm{e}}(t)$ together with smooth dependency on $W$ of all our observables within the entire simulation window as support for the cross-over scenario, discouraging an MBL transition within the traditional parametric window of computational studies.

cond-mat.dis-nn