Data of publication "Temporal relaxation of disordered many-body quantum systems under driving and dissipation"

Strong disorder inhibits thermalization in isolated quantum systems and may lead to many-bodylocalization (MBL). In realistic situations, however, the observation of MBL is hindered by residualcouplings of the system to an environment, which acts as a bath and pushes the system to thermalequilibrium. This paper is concerned with the transient dynamics prior to thermalization and studieshow the relaxation of a disordered system is altered under the influence of external driving anddissipation. We consider a scenario where a disordered quantum spin chain is placed into a strongmagnetic field that polarizes the system. By suddenly removing the external field, a nonequilibriumsituation is induced and the decay of magnetization probes the degree of localization. We show thatby driving the system with light, one can distinguish between different dynamical regimes as thespins are more or less susceptible to the drive depending on the strength of the disorder. We provideevidence that some of these signatures remain observable at intermediate time scales even when thespin chain is subject to noise due to coupling to an environment. From a numerical point of view,we demonstrate that the open-system dynamics starting from a class of experimentally relevantmixed initial states can be efficiently simulated by combining dynamical quantum typicality withstochastic unraveling of Lindblad master equations.