TY - JOUR
T1 - Universal slow growth of entanglement in interacting strongly disordered systems
AU - Serbyn, Maksym
AU - Papić, Z.
AU - Abanin, Dmitry A.
PY - 2013/6/28
Y1 - 2013/6/28
N2 - Recent numerical work by Bardarson, Pollmann, and Moore revealed a slow, logarithmic in time, growth of the entanglement entropy for initial product states in a putative many-body localized phase. We show that this surprising phenomenon results from the dephasing due to exponentially small interaction-induced corrections to the eigenenergies of different states. For weak interactions, we find that the entanglement entropy grows as ξln (Vt/), where V is the interaction strength, and ξ is the single-particle localization length. The saturated value of the entanglement entropy at long times is determined by the participation ratios of the initial state over the eigenstates of the subsystem. Our work shows that the logarithmic entanglement growth is a universal phenomenon characteristic of the many-body localized phase in any number of spatial dimensions, and reveals a broad hierarchy of dephasing time scales present in such a phase.
AB - Recent numerical work by Bardarson, Pollmann, and Moore revealed a slow, logarithmic in time, growth of the entanglement entropy for initial product states in a putative many-body localized phase. We show that this surprising phenomenon results from the dephasing due to exponentially small interaction-induced corrections to the eigenenergies of different states. For weak interactions, we find that the entanglement entropy grows as ξln (Vt/), where V is the interaction strength, and ξ is the single-particle localization length. The saturated value of the entanglement entropy at long times is determined by the participation ratios of the initial state over the eigenstates of the subsystem. Our work shows that the logarithmic entanglement growth is a universal phenomenon characteristic of the many-body localized phase in any number of spatial dimensions, and reveals a broad hierarchy of dephasing time scales present in such a phase.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.260601
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.260601
M3 - Article
C2 - 23848859
AN - SCOPUS:84879637260
SN - 0031-9007
VL - 110
JO - Physical review letters
JF - Physical review letters
IS - 26
M1 - 260601
ER -