Strongly correlated systems can exhibit surprising phenomena when brought in a state far from equilibrium. A spectacular example are quantum avalanches, that have been predicted to run through a many-body--localized system and delocalize it. Quantum avalanches occur when the system is locally coupled to a small thermal inclusion that acts as a bath. Here we realize an interface between a many-body--localized system and a thermal inclusion of variable size, and study its dynamics. We find evidence for accelerated transport into the localized region, signature of a quantum avalanche. By measuring the site-resolved entropy we monitor how the avalanche travels through the localized system and thermalizes it site by site. Furthermore, we isolate the bath-induced dynamics by evaluating multipoint correlations between the bath and the system. Our results have fundamental implications on the robustness of many-body--localized systems and their critical behavior.
Coupling a many-body-localized system to a dissipative bath necessarily leads to delocalization. Here, we investigate the nature of the ensuing relaxation dynamics and the information it holds on the many-body-localized state. We formulate the relevant Lindblad equation in terms of the local integrals of motion of the underlying localized Hamiltonian. This allows to map the quantum evolution deep in the localized state to tractable classical rate equations. We consider two different types of dissipation relevant to systems of ultra-cold atoms: dephasing due to inelastic scattering on the latti…
I discuss the quantum dynamics of strongly disordered quantum systems with critically long range interactions, decaying as $1/r^{2d}$ in $d$ spatial dimensions. I argue that, contrary to expectations, localization in such systems is stable at low orders in perturbation theory, giving rise to an unusual `critically many body localized regime.' I discuss the phenomenology of this critical MBL regime, which includes distinctive signatures in entanglement, charge statistics, noise, and transport. Experimentally, such a critically localized regime can be realized in three dimensional systems with V…
The many-body localization (MBL) phase transition is not a conventional thermodynamic phase transition. Thus to define the phase transition one should allow the possibility of taking the limit of an infinite system in a way that is not the conventional thermodynamic limit. We explore this for the so-called "avalanche" instability due to rare thermalizing regions in the MBL phase for quenched-random systems in more than one spatial dimension, finding an unconventional way of scaling the systems so that they do have a type of phase transition. These arguments suggest that the MBL phase transitio…
We investigate the relaxation dynamics of an interacting Stark-localized system coupled to a dephasing bath, and compare its behavior to the conventional disorder-induced many body localized system. Specifically, we study the dynamics of population imbalance between even and odd sites, and the growth of the von Neumann entropy. For a large potential gradient, the imbalance is found to decay on a time scale that grows quadratically with the Wannier-Stark tilt. For the non-interacting system, it shows an exponential decay, which becomes a stretched exponential decay in the presence of finite int…
Thermalizing and localized many-body quantum systems present two distinct dynamical phases of matter. Recently, the fate of a localized system coupled to a thermalizing system viewed as a quantum bath received significant theoretical and experimental attention. In this work, we study a mobile impurity, representing a small quantum bath, that interacts locally with an Anderson insulator with a finite density of localized particles. Using static Hartree approximation to obtain an effective disorder strength, we formulate an analytic criterion for the perturbative stability of the localization. N…
We report on spin dynamics of individual, localized neutral impurities immersed in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Single Cesium atoms are transported into a cloud of Rubidium atoms, thermalize with the bath, and the ensuing spin-exchange between localized impurities with quasi-spin $F_i=3$ and bath atoms with $F_b=1$ is resolved. Comparing our data to numerical simulations of spin dynamics we find that, for gas densities in the BEC regime, the dynamics is dominated by the condensed fraction of the cloud. We spatially resolve the density overlap of impurities and gas by the spin-population of impu…
We propose and analyze a new approach to the coherent control and manipulation of quantum degrees of freedom in disordered, interacting systems in the many-body localized phase. Our approach leverages a number of unique features of many-body localization: a lack of thermalization, a locally gapped spectrum, and slow dephasing. Using the technique of quantum phase estimation, we demonstrate a protocol that enables the local preparation of a many-body system into an effective eigenstate. This leads to the ability to encode information and control interactions without full microscopic knowledge o…
We develop an efficient variational approach to studying dynamics of a localized quantum spin coupled to a bath of mobile spinful bosons. We use parity symmetry to decouple the impurity spin from the environment via a canonical transformation and reduce the problem to a model of the interacting bosonic bath. We describe coherent time evolution of the latter using bosonic Gaussian states as a variational ansatz. We provide full analytical expressions for equations describing variational time evolution that can be applied to study in- and out-of-equilibrium phenomena in a wide class of quantum i…
We investigate theoretically a one-dimensional ideal Bose gas that is driven into a steady state far from equilibrium via the coupling to two heat baths: a global bath of temperature $T$ and a "hot needle", a bath of temperature $T_h\gg T$ with localized coupling to the system. Remarkably, this system features a crossover to finite-size Bose condensation at temperatures $T$ that are orders of magnitude larger than the equilibrium condensation temperature. This counterintuitive effect is explained by a suppression of long-wavelength excitations resulting from the competition between both baths.…
Motivated by the recent experiments that reported signatures of many-body localization of ultracold atoms in optical lattices [M. Schreiber {\it et al.}, Science {\bf 349}, 842 (2015)], we study dynamics of highly excited states in the strongly disordered Hubbard model in one dimension. Owing to the $SU(2)$ spin symmetry, spin degrees of freedom form a delocalized thermal bath with a narrow bandwidth. The spin bath mediates slow particle transport, eventually leading to delocalization of particles. The particle hopping rate is exponentially small in $t/W$ ($t$, $W$ being hopping and disorder s…
Closed generic quantum many-body systems may fail to thermalize under certain conditions even after long times, a phenomenon called many-body localization (MBL). Numerous studies support the stability of the MBL phase in strongly disordered one-dimensional systems. However, the situation is much less clear when a small part of the system is ergodic, a scenario which also has important implications for the existence of many-body localization in higher dimensions. Here we address this question experimentally using a large-scale quantum simulator of ultracold bosons in a two-dimensional optical l…
Many-body localized (MBL) systems do not approach thermal equilibrium under their intrinsic dynamics; MBL and conventional thermalizing systems form distinct dynamical phases of matter, separated by a phase transition at which equilibrium statistical mechanics breaks down. True MBL is known to occur only under certain stringent conditions for perfectly isolated one-dimensional systems, with Hamiltonians that have strictly short-range interactions and lack any continuous non-Abelian symmetries. However, in practice, even systems that are not strictly MBL can be nearly MBL, with equilibration ra…
We investigate a one dimensional quantum fluid coupled to a dissipative bath. The quantum fluid is captured by the canonical Luttinger liquid; the bath is given by the model of Caldeira and Leggett, i.e. a tower of oscillators coupled linearly to the fluid density, $ρ$. The bath can be integrated out exactly, producing an effective interaction for the fluid that is nonlocal in time; we argue that the form corresponding to Ohmic dissipation is generic. Compared to previous works, we compute correlation functions for this minimal model without approximation, including at finite temperature $T>0$…
