Inhomogeneous Floquet thermalization

Abstract

How a closed system thermalizes, especially in the absence of global conservation laws but in the presence of disorder and interactions, is one of the central questions in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. We explore this for a disordered, periodically driven Ising chain. Our numerical results reveal inhomogeneous thermalization leading to a distribution of thermalization timescales within a single disordered sample, which we encode via a distribution of effective local temperatures. Using this, we find an excellent collapse $\textit{without}$ $\textit{any}$ $\textit{fitting}$ $\textit{parameters}$ of the local relaxation dynamics for the entire range of disorder values in the ergodic regime when adapting the disorder-averaged diagonal entanglement entropy as internal `time' of the system. This approach evidences a remarkably uniform parametrization of the dynamical many-body evolution of local temperature within the otherwise highly heterogeneous ergodic regime, independent of the strength of the disorder.