Lack of thermalization for integrability-breaking impurities

We investigate dynamics of a single mobile impurity immersed in a bath of Anderson localized particles and focus on the regime of relatively strong disorder and interactions. In that regime, the dynamics of the system is particularly slow, suggesting, at short times, an occurrence of many-body localization. Considering longer time scales, we show that the latter is a transient effect and that, eventually, the impurity spreads sub-diffusively and induces a gradual delocalizati...

We study a model of frustration of decoherence in an open quantum system. Contrary to other dissipative ohmic impurity models, such as the Kondo model or the dissipative two-level system, the impurity model discussed here never presents overdamped dynamics even for strong coupling to the environment. We show that this unusual effect has its origins in the quantum mechanical nature of the coupling between the quantum impurity and the environment. We study the problem using ana...

Understanding how isolated quantum systems thermalize has recently gathered renewed interest almost 100 years after the first work by von Neumann, thanks to the experimental realizations of such systems. Experimental and numerical pieces of evidence imply that nonintegrability of the system plays an important role in thermalization. Nonintegrable systems that conserve energy alone are expected to be effectively described by the (micro)canonical ensemble due to the so-called e...

An isolated quantum many-body system in an initial pure state will come to thermal equilibrium if it satisfies the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). We consider alternatives to ETH that have been proposed. We first show that von Neumann's quantum ergodic theorem relies on an assumption that is essentially equivalent to ETH. We also investigate whether, following a sudden quench, special classes of pure states can lead to thermal behavior in systems that do not obey ...

We investigate the behavior of a harmonically trapped system consisting of an impurity in a dilute ideal Bose gas after the boson-impurity interaction is suddenly switched on. As theoretical framework, we use a field theory approach in the space-time domain within the T-matrix approximation. We establish the form of the corresponding T-matrix and address the dynamical properties of the system. As a numerical application, we consider a simple system of a weakly interacting imp...

We investigate the dynamics of entanglement between the system and the environment during thermalization of a noninteracting fermionic impurity coupled to a fermionic thermal bath. We show that transient entanglement can be observed even in the weak coupling regime, when the reduced dynamics and thermodynamics of the system can be well described by an effectively classical and Markovian master equation for the state populations. This entanglement vanishes for long times, but ...

We study quantum quenches between integrable and nonintegrable hard-core boson models in the thermodynamic limit with numerical linked cluster expansions. We show that while quenches in which the initial state is a thermal equilibrium state of an integrable model and the final Hamiltonian is nonintegrable (quantum chaotic) lead to thermalization, the reverse is not true. While this might appear counterintuitive given the fact that the eigenstates of both Hamiltonians are rela...

We estimate the changes in the condensate ground state energy induced by one or more "sizable" impurities. By "sizable", we mean an impurity whose size is within a few orders of magnitude of the trap size and not necessarily atomic in scale. A sizable impurity will "drill" a hole in the condensate wave function and alter the condensate energy. The question is whether this microscopic change can be detected macroscopically because of the Bose-Einstein condensation effect. We d...

The one-dimensional free Fermi gas is a prototype conformally invariant system, whose entanglement properties are well-understood. In this work, the effects of a single impurity on one dimensional free fermion entanglement entropy are studied both analytically and numerically. Such an impurity represents an exactly marginal perturbation to the bulk conformally invariant fixed point. We find that the impurity leads to sub-leading contributions to the entanglement entropy that ...

We use quantum quenches to study the dynamics and thermalization of hardcore bosons in finite one-dimensional lattices. We perform exact diagonalizations and find that, far away from integrability, few-body observables thermalize. We then study the breakdown of thermalization as one approaches an integrable point. This is found to be a smooth process in which the predictions of standard statistical mechanics continuously worsen as the system moves toward integrability. We est...