title: Localization and glassy dynamics of many-body quantum systems.
abstract: When classical systems fail to explore their entire configurational space, intriguing macroscopic phenomena like aging and glass formation may emerge. Also closed quanto-mechanical systems may stop wandering freely around the whole Hilbert space, even if they are initially prepared into a macroscopically large combination of eigenstates. Here, we report numerical evidences that the dynamics of strongly interacting lattice bosons driven sufficiently far from equilibrium can be trapped into extremely long-lived inhomogeneous metastable states. The slowing down of incoherent density excitations above a threshold energy, much reminiscent of a dynamical arrest on the verge of a glass transition, is identified as the key feature of this phenomenon. We argue that the resulting long-lived inhomogeneities are responsible for the lack of thermalization observed in large systems. Such a rich phenomenology could be experimentally uncovered upon probing the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of conveniently prepared quantum states of trapped cold atoms which we hereby suggest.
authors.forename: Giuseppe
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Carleo
authors.forename: Federico
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Becca
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schiró
authors.forename: Michele
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fabrizio