- Letter
Glassy quantum dynamics of disordered Ising spins
Phys. Rev. B 105, L020201 – Published 19 January, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.L020201
Abstract
We study the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of the quantum Ising model with power-law interactions and positional disorder. For arbitrary dimension and interaction range we analytically find a stretched-exponential decay of the global magnetization and ensemble-averaged single-spin purity with a stretch power in the thermodynamic limit. Numerically, we confirm that glassy behavior persists for finite system sizes and sufficiently strong disorder. We identify dephasing between disordered coherent pairs as the main mechanism leading to a relaxation of global magnetization, whereas genuine many-body interactions lead to a loss of single-spin purity which signifies the buildup of entanglement. The emergence of glassy dynamics in the quantum Ising model extends prior findings in classical and open quantum systems, where the stretched-exponential law is explained by a scale-invariant distribution of timescales, to both integrable and nonintegrable quantum systems.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Corrections
27 January, 2022
Correction: The surname of the eighth author appeared incorrectly due to a conversion error and has been fixed.