Stark many-body localization

Understand

We consider spinless fermions on a finite one-dimensional lattice, interacting via nearest-neighbor repulsion and subject to a strong electric field.

• In the non-interacting case, due to Wannier-Stark localization, the single-particle wave functions are exponentially localized even though the model has no quenched disorder.
• We show that this system remains localized in the presence of interactions and exhibits physics analogous to models of conventional many-body localization (MBL).
• In particular, the entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with time after a quench, albeit with a slightly different functional form from the MBL case, and the level statistics of the many-body energy spectrum are Poissonian.