Data of publication "Temporal relaxation of disordered many-body quantum systems under driving and dissipation"

Strong disorder inhibits thermalization in isolated quantum systems and may lead to many-body
localization (MBL). In realistic situations, however, the observation of MBL is hindered by residual
couplings of the system to an environment, which acts as a bath and pushes the system to thermal
equilibrium. This paper is concerned with the transient dynamics prior to thermalization and studies
how the relaxation of a disordered system is altered under the influence of external driving and
dissipation. We consider a scenario where a disordered quantum spin chain is placed into a strong
magnetic field that polarizes the system. By suddenly removing the external field, a nonequilibrium
situation is induced and the decay of magnetization probes the degree of localization. We show that
by driving the system with light, one can distinguish between different dynamical regimes as the
spins are more or less susceptible to the drive depending on the strength of the disorder. We provide
evidence that some of these signatures remain observable at intermediate time scales even when the
spin chain is subject to noise due to coupling to an environment. From a numerical point of view,
we demonstrate that the open-system dynamics starting from a class of experimentally relevant
mixed initial states can be efficiently simulated by combining dynamical quantum typicality with
stochastic unraveling of Lindblad master equations.