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Title: Screening the Coulomb interaction leads to a prethermal regime in two-dimensional bad conductors
Abstract

The absence of thermalization in certain isolated many-body systems is of great fundamental interest. Many-body localization (MBL) is a widely studied mechanism for thermalization to fail in strongly disordered quantum systems, but it is still not understood precisely how the range of interactions affects the dynamical behavior and the existence of MBL, especially in dimensionsD > 1. By investigating nonequilibrium dynamics in strongly disorderedD = 2 electron systems with power-law interactions ∝ 1/rαand poor coupling to a thermal bath, here we observe MBL-like, prethermal dynamics forα = 3. In contrast, forα = 1, the system thermalizes, although the dynamics is glassy. Our results provide important insights for theory, especially since we obtained them on systems that are much closer to the thermodynamic limit than synthetic quantum systems employed in previous studies of MBL. Thus, our work is a key step towards further studies of ergodicity breaking and quantum entanglement in real materials.

 
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Award ID(s):
2104193 1707785 1307075
NSF-PAR ID:
10472424
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Nature Publishing Group
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Nature Communications
Volume:
14
Issue:
1
ISSN:
2041-1723
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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