Entanglement dynamics of a many-body localized system coupled to a bath
Elisabeth Wybo, Michael Knap, Frank Pollmann
Abstract
The combination of strong disorder and interactions in closed quantum systems can lead to many-body localization (MBL). However, this quantum phase is not stable when the system is coupled to a thermal environment. We investigate how MBL is destroyed in systems that are weakly coupled to a dephasive Markovian environment by focusing on their entanglement dynamics. We numerically study the third R\'enyi negativity ${R}_{3}$, a recently proposed entanglement proxy based on the negativity that captures the unbounded logarithmic growth in the closed case and that can be computed efficiently with tensor networks. We also show that the decay of ${R}_{3}$ follows a stretched exponential law, similarly to the imbalance, with, however, a smaller stretching exponent.