Zala Lenarčič
Many-body localization (MBL) is typically studied in closed setups because any coupling to a thermal bath breaks the local integrals of motion and causes relaxation to a thermal steady state. However, if one considers coupling to non-thermal baths or if the system is also weakly driven, the local integrals of motion obtain highly non-thermal values. Nearly thermal steady states in the ergodic phase are thus distinctly different from highly non-thermal steady states in the MBL phase.
I will describe how this property can be used to study the MBL phase transition in weakly open driven systems. By tuning the coupling strength to the environment, we can detect key features of the MBL transition: the divergence of dynamical exponent and the lower bound on the critical disorder strength.
In the end, I will show how to detect the lack of thermalization due to MBL or integrability with an unsupervised learning approach based on autoencoders by only considering local observables. The proposed procedure allows to identify the local complexity of states from experimental setups and even extract the responsible Hamiltonian operator.
[2] Z. Lenarcic, O. Alberton, A. Rosch, and E. Altman, PRL 125, 116601 (2020).
[3] M. Schmitt and Z. Lenarcic, arXiv:2102.11328