Enhanced localization in the prethermal regime of continuously measured many-body localized systems

Abstract

Many-body localized systems exhibit a unique characteristic of avoiding thermalization, primarily attributed to the presence of a local disorder potential in the Hamiltonian. In recent years there has been an interest in simulating these systems on quantum devices. However, actual quantum devices are subject to unavoidable decoherence that can be modeled as coupling to a bath or continuous measurements. The quantum Zeno effect is also known to inhibit thermalization in a quantum system, where repeated measurements suppress transport. In this work we study the interplay of many-body localization and the many-body quantum Zeno effect. In a prethermal regime, we find that signatures of many-body localization are enhanced when the system is coupled to a bath that contains measurements of local fermion population, subject to the appropriate choice of system and bath parameters.