Iterative Construction of Conserved Quantities in Dissipative Nearly Integrable Systems.

Integrable systems offer rare examples of solvable many-body problems in the quantum world. Because of the fine-tuned structure, their realization in nature and experiment is never completely accurate, and therefore effects of integrability are observed only transiently. One way to overcome this limitation is to weakly couple nearly integrable systems to baths and driving: this will stabilize integrable effects up to arbitrary time and encode them in the stationary state approximated by a generalized Gibbs ensemble.

Critical Behavior near the Many-Body Localization Transition in Driven Open Systems.

Coupling a many-body localized system to a thermal bath breaks local conservation laws and washes out signatures of localization. When the bath is nonthermal or when the system is also weakly driven, local conserved quantities acquire a highly nonthermal stationary value. We demonstrate how this property can be used to study the many-body localization phase transition in weakly open systems.

Activating Many-Body Localization in Solids by Driving with Light.

Because of the presence of phonons, many-body localization (MBL) does not occur in disordered solids, even if disorder is strong. Local conservation laws characterizing an underlying MBL phase decay due to the coupling to phonons. We show that this decay can be compensated when the system is driven out of equilibrium.

Pumping approximately integrable systems.

Weak perturbations can drive an interacting many-particle system far from its initial equilibrium state if one is able to pump into degrees of freedom approximately protected by conservation laws. This concept has for example been used to realize Bose-Einstein condensates of photons, magnons and excitons. Integrable quantum systems, like the one-dimensional Heisenberg model, are characterized by an infinite set of conservation laws.

Exact asymptotics of the current in boundary-driven dissipative quantum chains in large external fields.

A boundary-driven quantum master equation for a general inhomogeneous (nonintegrable) anisotropic Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain, or an equivalent nearest neighbor interacting spinless fermion chain, is considered in the presence of a strong external field f. We present an exact closed form expression for large f asymptotics of the current in the presence of a pure incoherent source and sink dissipation at the boundaries. In application, we demonstrate an arbitrary large current rectification in the presence of the interaction.

Ultrafast charge recombination in a photoexcited Mott-Hubbard insulator.

We present a calculation of the recombination rate of the excited holon-doublon pairs based on the two-dimensional model relevant for undoped cuprates, which shows that fast processes, observed in pump-probe experiments on Mott-Hubbard insulators in the picosecond range, can be explained even quantitatively with the multimagnon emission. The precondition is the existence of the Mott-Hubbard bound exciton of the s-type. We find that its decay is exponentially dependent on the Mott-Hubbard gap and on the magnon energy, with a small prefactor, which can be traced back to strong correlations and consequently large exciton-magnon coupling.

Dielectric breakdown in spin-polarized Mott insulator.

Nonlinear response of a Mott insulator to external electric field, corresponding to dielectric breakdown phenomenon, is studied within of a one-dimensional half-filled Hubbard model. It is shown that in the limit of nearly spin-polarized insulator the decay rate of the ground state into excited holon-doublon pair can be evaluated numerically as well to high accuracy analytically. Results show that the threshold field depends on the charge gap as F(th)∝Δ(3/2).