Anderson and many-body localization in the presence of spatially correlated classical noise

We study the effect of spatially correlated classical noise on both Anderson and many-body localization of a disordered fermionic chain. By analyzing the evolution of the particle density imbalance following a quench from an initial charge density wave state, we find prominent signatures of localization also in the presence of the time-dependent noise, even though the system eventually relaxes to the infinite temperature state. In particular, for sufficiently strong static disorder, we observe the onset of metastability, which becomes more prominent the stronger the spatial correlations of the noise. In this regime, we find that the imbalance decays as a stretched-exponential-a behavior characteristic of glassy systems. We identify a simple scaling behavior of the relevant relaxation times in terms of the static disorder and of the noise correlation length. We discuss how our results could be exploited to extract information about the localization length in experimental setups.

Automated summary

We study the effect of spatially correlated classical noise on both Anderson and many-body localization of a disordered fermionic chain. We find prominent signatures of localization even in the presence of time-dependent noise. For sufficiently strong static disorder, we observe the onset of metastability, which becomes more prominent with stronger spatial correlations of the noise. We identify a simple scaling behavior of the relevant relaxation times in terms of the static disorder and noise correlation length.