No Arabic abstract
Strictly speaking the laws of the conventional Statistical Physics, based on the Equipartition Postulate and Ergodicity Hypothesis, apply only in the presence of a heat bath. Until recently this restriction was not important for real physical systems: a weak coupling with the bath was believed to be sufficient. However, the progress in both quantum gases and solid state coherent quantum devices demonstrates that the coupling to the bath can be reduced dramatically. To describe such systems properly one should revisit the very foundations of the Statistical Mechanics. We examine this general problem for the case of the Josephson junction chain and show that it displays a novel high temperature non-ergodic phase with finite resistance. With further increase of the temperature the system undergoes a transition to the fully localized state characterized by infinite resistance and exponentially long relaxation.
An important challenge in the field of many-body quantum dynamics is to identify non-ergodic states of matter beyond many-body localization (MBL). Strongly disordered spin chains with non-Abelian symmetry and chains of non-Abelian anyons are natural candidates, as they are incompatible with standard MBL. In such chains, real space renormalization group methods predict a partially localized, non-ergodic regime known as a quantum critical glass (a critical variant of MBL). This regime features a tree-like hierarchy of integrals of motion and symmetric eigenstates with entanglement entropy that scales as a logarithmically enhanced area law. We argue that such tentative non-ergodic states are perturbatively unstable using an analytic computation of the scaling of off-diagonal matrix elements and accessible level spacing of local perturbations. Our results indicate that strongly disordered chains with non-Abelian symmetry display either spontaneous symmetry breaking or ergodic thermal behavior at long times. We identify the relevant length and time scales for thermalization: even if such chains eventually thermalize, they can exhibit non-ergodic dynamics up to parametrically long time scales with a non-analytic dependence on disorder strength.
In this paper, we study the basic problem of a charged particle in a stochastic magnetic field. We consider dichotomous fluctuations of the magnetic field {where the sojourn time in one of the two states are distributed according to a given waiting time distribution either with Poisson or non-Poisson statistics, including as well the case of distributions with diverging mean time between changes of the field}, corresponding to an ergodicity breaking condition. We provide analytical and numerical results for all cases evaluating the average and the second moment of the position and velocity of the particle. We show that the field fluctuations induce diffusion of the charge with either normal or anomalous properties, depending on the statistics of the fluctuations, with distinct regimes from those observed, e.g., in standard Continuous Time Random Walk models.
We report the results of the numerical study of the non-dissipative quantum Josephson junction chain with the focus on the statistics of many-body wave functions and local energy spectra. The disorder in this chain is due to the random offset charges. This chain is one of the simplest physical systems to study many-body localization. We show that the system may exhibit three distinct regimes: insulating, characterized by the full localization of many-body wavefunctions, fully delocalized (metallic) one characterized by the wavefunctions that take all the available phase volume and the intermediate regime in which the volume taken by the wavefunction scales as a non-trivial power of the full Hilbert space volume. In the intermediate, non-ergodic regime the Thouless conductance (generalized to many-body problem) does not change as a function of the chain length indicating a failure of the conventional single-parameter scaling theory of localization transition. The local spectra in this regime display the fractal structure in the energy space which is related with the fractal structure of wave functions in the Hilbert space. A simple theory of fractality of local spectra is proposed and a new scaling relationship between fractal dimensions in the Hilbert and energy space is suggested and numerically tested.
We propose a Josephson junction array which can be tuned into an unconventional insulating state by varying external magnetic field. This insulating state retains a gap to half vortices; as a consequence, such array with non-trivial global geometry exhibits a ground state degeneracy. This degeneracy is protected from the effects of external noise. We compute the gaps separating higher energy states from the degenerate ground state and we discuss experiments probing the unusual properties of this insulator.
We propose a scheme to implement a tunable, wide frequency-band dissipative environment using a double chain of Josephson junctions. The two parallel chains consist of identical SQUIDs, with magnetic-flux tunable inductance, coupled to each other at each node via a capacitance much larger than the junction capacitance. Thanks to this capacitive coupling, the system sustains electromagnetic modes with a wide frequency dispersion. The internal quality factor of the modes is maintained as high as possible, and the damping is introduced by a uniform coupling of the modes to a transmission line, itself connected to an amplification and readout circuit. For sufficiently long chains, containing several thousands of junctions, the resulting admittance is a smooth function versus frequency in the microwave domain, and its effective dissipation can be continuously monitored by recording the emitted radiation in the transmission line. We show that by varying in-situ the SQUIDs inductance, the double chain can operate as tunable ohmic resistor in a frequency band spanning up to one GHz, with a resistance that can be swept through values comparable to the resistance quantum R_q = (h/4e^2) ~ 6.5 k{Omega}. We argue that the circuit complexity is within reach using current Josephson junction technology.