2020/03/31 by Irene Papaefstathiou, Adam Smith, Johannes Knolle · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.102.165132
published as Phys. Rev. B 102, 165132 (2020) · 7 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2020/07/08 · arxiv updated 2020/10/21
Localization due to the presence of disorder has proven crucial for our current understanding of relaxation in isolated quantum systems. The many-body localized phase constitutes a robust alternative to the thermalization of complex interacting systems, but recently the importance of disorder has been brought into question. Starting from translationally invariant (1 + 1)-dimensional quantum electrodynamics, we modify the dynamics of the gauge field and reveal a mechanism of disorder-free localization. We consider two different discretizations of the continuum model resulting in a free-fermion soluble model in one case and an interacting model in the other. We diagnose the localization in the far-from-equilibrium dynamics following a global quantum quench.