Dynamics of many-body localisation in a translation invariant quantum glass model

Understand

We study the real-time dynamics of a translationally invariant quantum spin chain, based on the East kinetically constrained glass model, in search for evidence of many-body localisation in the absence of disorder.

• Numerical simulations indicate a change, controlled by a coupling parameter, from a regime of fast relaxation---corresponding to thermalisation---to a regime of very slow relaxation.
• This slowly relaxing regime is characterised by dynamical features usually associated with non-ergodicity and many-body localisation (MBL): memory of initial conditions, logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy, and non-exponential decay of time-correlators.
• We show that slow relaxation is a consequence of sensitivity to spatial fluctuations in the initial state.