(American Physical Society (APS), 2014) Serbyn, M.; Knap, Michael; Gopalakrishnan, Sarang; Papić, Z.; Yao, Norman; Laumann, C. R.; Abanin, Dmitry; Lukin, Mikhail; Demler, Eugene
We propose a method for detecting many-body localization (MBL) in disordered spin systems. The method involves pulsed coherent spin manipulations that probe the dephasing of a given spin due to its entanglement with a set of distant spins. It allows one to distinguish the MBL phase from a noninteracting localized phase and a delocalized phase. In particular, we show that for a properly chosen pulse sequence the MBL phase exhibits a characteristic power-law decay reflecting its slow growth of entanglement. We find that this power-law decay is robust with respect to thermal and disorder averaging, provide numerical simulations supporting our results, and discuss possible experimental realizations in solid-state and cold-atom systems.
