Orateur
Description
The mechanisms that quantum systems can use to avoid thermalization and retain information in their local degrees of freedom have been of great research interest for both new fundamental physics and novel applications. These mechanisms, for example, are of great importance for quantum technologies since they can be used to build quantum memory devices. In quantum materials, there has been a recent surge of interest in exploring nonequilibrium phenomena, but most studies have focused on driving a system out of equilibrium by supplying it with energy, resulting in transient behaviors on ultra-short time scales or nonequilibrium steady states. In contrast, the goal of our work is to investigate far-from-equilibrium phenomena in situations where thermalization involves many slow processes and when the externally supplied energy is insufficient to allow the quantum system to explore all states on experimental time scales.
This talk will discuss transport measurements that probe far-from-equilibrium behavior and the approach to thermal equilibrium in an open two-dimensional electron system at different densities across the metal-insulator transition. We observe different types of far-from-equilibrium dynamics, including many-body localization (MBL). We establish the phase diagram of the dynamical behavior that shows the crossover between MBL and ergodic regimes as a function of density and bath temperature.
