TY - JOUR
T1 - Nucleation of Ergodicity by a Single Mobile Impurity in Supercooled Insulators
AU - Krause, Ulrich
AU - Pellegrin, Théo
AU - Brouwer, Piet W.
AU - Abanin, Dmitry A.
AU - Filippone, Michele
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Physical Society.
PY - 2021/1/21
Y1 - 2021/1/21
N2 - We consider a disordered Hubbard model and show that, at sufficiently weak disorder, a single spin-down mobile impurity can thermalize an extensive initially localized system of spin-up particles. Thermalization is enabled by resonant processes that involve correlated hops of the impurity and localized particles. This effect indicates that Anderson localized insulators behave as "supercooled"systems, with mobile impurities acting as ergodic seeds. We provide analytical estimates, supported by numerical exact diagonalization, showing how the critical disorder strength for such mechanism depends on the particle density of the localized system. In the U→∞ limit, doublons are stable excitations, and they can thermalize mesoscopic systems by a similar mechanism. The emergence of an additional conservation law leads to an eventual localization of doublons. Our predictions apply to fermionic and bosonic systems and are readily accessible in ongoing experiments simulating synthetic quantum lattices with tunable disorder.
AB - We consider a disordered Hubbard model and show that, at sufficiently weak disorder, a single spin-down mobile impurity can thermalize an extensive initially localized system of spin-up particles. Thermalization is enabled by resonant processes that involve correlated hops of the impurity and localized particles. This effect indicates that Anderson localized insulators behave as "supercooled"systems, with mobile impurities acting as ergodic seeds. We provide analytical estimates, supported by numerical exact diagonalization, showing how the critical disorder strength for such mechanism depends on the particle density of the localized system. In the U→∞ limit, doublons are stable excitations, and they can thermalize mesoscopic systems by a similar mechanism. The emergence of an additional conservation law leads to an eventual localization of doublons. Our predictions apply to fermionic and bosonic systems and are readily accessible in ongoing experiments simulating synthetic quantum lattices with tunable disorder.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.030603
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.030603
M3 - Article
C2 - 33543943
AN - SCOPUS:85099785545
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 126
JO - Physical review letters
JF - Physical review letters
IS - 3
M1 - 030603
ER -