Kohlrausch regime of slow relaxation and its phenomenology in isolated quantum many-body systems with strong disorder

Abstract

The Kohlrausch(-Williams-Watts) law of stretched exponential relaxation has been observed for over a century and a half in diverse complex classical systems. Here we show that this law describes relaxation quite generically in closed (executing Schrödinger dynamics), interacting disordered many-body systems, using interaction range and disorder strength as primary tuning parameters. This we observe for both time-independent and periodically driven (Floquet) systems. Finite-size analysis indicates the persistence of this nonthermal relaxation regime in the thermodynamic limit thus defining a distinct dynamical regime. This regime exhibits a peak in the time scale of the long-time relaxation (following a transient), upon crossing over from weak to strong disorder. We provide a simple picture of this behavior, which naturally accounts for its generic occurrence. Formation of spin-glass — one of the possible mechanisms for stretched relaxation appears incidental to the occurrence of Kohlrausch law in our context. Finally, we provide a simple non-Hermitian Hamiltonian formulation for the dynamics of a single spin embedded in the disordered chain. This provides an analytical formula that captures not only the Kohlrausch relaxation of the disorder averaged autocorrelation but also captures the largely diverse dynamics of an arbitrary target spin in the system. Our work hence also provides a concrete quantification of the “prethermal slowness” in many-body disordered system. Published by the American Physical Society 2025