Jeudi 03 décembre 2015 à 10h15
Salle 234, Ecole de Physique

Many-body localization and topology in open systems

Evert van Nieuwenburg, ETH Zürich

Typically, interesting states of matter such as topological states or many-body localized systems are discussed in ideally isolated systems. Both from a fundamental point of view as well as for concrete experimental investigations, a solid understanding of the effect of an attached bath is of significant importance, however. For example, in explicitly driven-and-dissipative systems, the bath is an essential ingredient in stabilizing various exotic phases such as incompressible states of light. Contrarily, the bath may compete with the physics of the ideally closed system: We investigate the fate of a symmetry protected topological state when coupled to an external environment, showing that it loses its topological features. Moreover, we study the equilibration properties of disordered interacting open quantum systems, by coupling baths to the ends of a 1D many body localized spin chain.