Regimes of heating and dynamical response in driven many-body localized systems

Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Michael Knap, and Eugene Demler
Phys. Rev. B 94, 094201 – Published 14 September 2016

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.

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  • Received 7 April 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.094201

©2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied PhysicsStatistical Physics & ThermodynamicsAtomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Sarang Gopalakrishnan

  • Department of Physics and Walter Burke Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA

Michael Knap

  • Department of Physics, Walter Schottky Institute, and Institute for Advanced Study, Technical University of Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany

Eugene Demler

  • Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

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Issue

Vol. 94, Iss. 9 — 1 September 2016

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