Interferometric Probes of Many-Body Localization

We propose a method for detecting many-body localization (MBL) in disordered spin systems. The method involves pulsed coherent spin manipulations that probe the dephasing of a given spin due to its entanglement with a set of distant spins. It allows one to distinguish the MBL phase from a noninterac...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Serbyn, Maksym, Knap, M., Gopalakrishnan, S., Papic, Z., Yao, N. Y., Laumann, C. R., Abanin, Dmitry A., Lukin, Mikhail D., Demler, Eugene
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/90831
Description
Summary:We propose a method for detecting many-body localization (MBL) in disordered spin systems. The method involves pulsed coherent spin manipulations that probe the dephasing of a given spin due to its entanglement with a set of distant spins. It allows one to distinguish the MBL phase from a noninteracting localized phase and a delocalized phase. In particular, we show that for a properly chosen pulse sequence the MBL phase exhibits a characteristic power-law decay reflecting its slow growth of entanglement. We find that this power-law decay is robust with respect to thermal and disorder averaging, provide numerical simulations supporting our results, and discuss possible experimental realizations in solid-state and cold-atom systems.