Activating many-body localization in solids by driving with light

Understand

Due to the presence of phonons, many body localization (MBL) does not occur in disordered solids, even if disorder is strong.

• Local conservation laws characterizing an underlying MBL phase decay due to the coupling to phonons.
• Here we show that this decay can be compensated when the system is driven out of equilibrium.
• The resulting variations of the local temperature provide characteristic fingerprints of an underlying MBL phase.