Many body localized states coupled to a bath

Evert van Nieuwenburg, Oded Zilberberg and Sebastian Huber

Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

We consider an interacting 1D model of a closed system that fails to thermalize in the presence of disorder. Such a system is called many-body localized and, due to its non-ergodicity, implies that statistical physics doesn't trivially emerge from quantum mechanics. In a real-life experiment however, a system is never closed and will always reach a thermal equilibrium eventually. We ask if the dynamics of approaching the thermal state when coupled to a bath provides information about the closed, many-body localized state.