Signatures of many-body localization in steady states of open quantum systems

I. Vakulchyk, I. Yusipov, M. Ivanchenko, S. Flach, S. Denisov

Published 2017-09-26Version 1

Many-body localization (MBL) is an act of balance between disorder-induced interference-based Anderson localization, and many-body interactions in an ultra-high dimensional Fock space. It is usually expected that dissipation is blurring interference and destroying that balance, so that the asymptotic state of a system with an MBL Hamiltonian does not bear localization signatures. We demonstrate, within the framework of the Lindblad formalism, that the system can be brought into a steady state with non-vanishing MBL signatures. We use a set of irreducible dissipative operators acting on pairs of connected sites (or spins), and show that the difference between ergodic and MBL Hamiltonians is encoded in the accessible imbalance, entanglement entropy, and level spacing characteristics of the density operator. An MBL system which is exposed to the combined impact of local dephasing and pairwise dissipation evinces localization signatures hitherto absent in the steady state.