Phase-dependent role of dissipation across the Aubry-André-Harper transition

Abstract

We study transport across the Aubry-André-Harper localization transition in the presence of non-Markovian dissipation. For a single particle initially at the center of the chain, we show that bath memory (i.e., finite decay time of bath correlations) plays distinct roles in the two phases. In the extended phase, bath memory qualitatively reshapes the dynamical generator, thereby producing transport patterns that cannot be reduced to a simple rescaling of time. By contrast, in the localized phase, the bath activates motion between localized states and bath memory mainly renormalizes the dynamical timescales. Our results identify localization as a simple filter of non-Markovian effects: memory restructures transport in the extended regime, but survives mainly as a timescale renormalization in the deeply localized regime.