Recent studies point towards nontriviality of the ergodic phase in systems exhibiting many-body localization (MBL), which shows subexponential relaxation of local observables, subdiffusive transport and sublinear spreading of the entanglement entropy. Here we review the dynamical properties of this phase and the available numerically exact and approximate methods for its study. We discuss in which sense this phase could be considered ergodic and present possible phenomenological explanations of its dynamical properties. We close by analyzing to which extent the proposed explanations were verified by numerical studies and present the open questions in this field.
It is commonly believed that quantum isolated systems satisfying the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) are diffusive. We show that this assumption is too restrictive, since there are systems that are asymptotically in a thermal state, yet exhibit anomalous, subdiffusive thermalization. We show that such systems satisfy a modified version of the ETH ansatz and derive a general connection between the scaling of the variance of the offdiagonal matrix elements of local operators, written in the eigenbasis of the Hamiltonian, and the dynamical exponent. We find that for subdiffusively thermalizing systems the variance scales more slowly with system size than expected for diffusive systems. We corroborate our findings by numerically studying the distribution of the coefficients of the eigenfunctions and the offdiagonal matrix elements of local operators of the random field Heisenberg chain, which has anomalous transport in its thermal phase. Surprisingly, this system also has non-Gaussian distributions of the eigenfunctions, thus directly violating Berry's conjecture.
Entanglement growth and out-of-time-order correlators (OTOC) are used to assess the propagation of information in isolated quantum systems. In this work, using large scale exact time-evolution we show that for weakly disordered nonintegrable systems information propagates behind a ballistically moving front, and the entanglement entropy growths linearly in time. For stronger disorder the motion of the information front is algebraic and sub-ballistic and is characterized by an exponent which depends on the strength of the disorder, similarly to the sublinear growth of the entanglement entropy. We show that the dynamical exponent associated with the information front coincides with the exponent of the growth of the entanglement entropy for both weak and strong disorder. We also demonstrate that the temporal dependence of the OTOC is characterized by a fast nonexponential growth, followed by a slow saturation after the passage of the information front. Finally,we discuss the implications of this behavioral change on the growth of the entanglement entropy.Introduction. -While the speed of light is the absolute upper limit of information propagation in both classical and quantum relativistic systems, surprisingly a velocity which plays a similar role exists also for shortrange interacting nonrelativistic quantum systems. This velocity, known as the Lieb-Robinson velocity, bounds the spreading of correlations in the system and implies that information about local initial excitations propagates within a causal "light-cone", similarly to the lightcone encountered in the theory of special relativity [1]. The shape of the light-cone can be obtained from the correlation function
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