Bath-Induced Decay of Stark Many-Body Localization

• Published in: Physical review letters Vol. 123; no. 3; p. 030602
• Main Authors: Wu, Ling-Na, Eckardt, André
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 19.07.2019
• ISSN: 1079-7114
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.030602

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 timescale τ that grows quadratically with the Wannier-Stark tilt. For the noninteracting system, it shows an exponential decay, which becomes a stretched exponential decay in the presence of finite interactions. This is different from a system with disorder-induced localization, where the imbalance exhibits a stretched exponential decay also for vanishing interactions. As another clear qualitative difference, we do not find a logarithmically slow growth of the von Neumann entropy as it is found for the disordered system. Our findings can immediately be tested experimentally with ultracold atoms in optical lattices.