Dynamics of entanglement and transport in 1D systems with quenched randomness

Understand

Quenched randomness can have a dramatic effect on the dynamics of isolated 1D quantum many-body systems, even for systems that thermalize.

• This is because transport, entanglement, and operator spreading can be hindered by `Griffiths' rare regions which locally resemble the many-body-localized phase and thus act as weak links.
• We propose coarse-grained models for entanglement growth and for the spreading of quantum operators in the presence of such weak links.
• We also examine entanglement growth across a single weak link numerically.