Theory Seminar: Dynamics in the presence of local symmetry-breaking impurities

Yahui Li 
TUM
Quantum Many-Body Seminar at the Seminar Room
Wednesday, January 29, 11:00 CET
 

Continuous symmetries lead to universal slow relaxation in quantum many-body systems. In this talk, I will show how local symmetry-breaking impurities affect the dynamics of correlation functions using Brownian quantum circuits. While explicitly breaking the symmetry, we find that approximately conserved quantities that survive can still induce slow relaxation. In one dimension, we show that local symmetry-breaking impurities increase the decay exponent of autocorrelation functions for charge-conserving circuits, while inducing long-lived prethermal plateus for strong Hilbert space fragmentation.