Effects of dissipation

The goal of MBL is to identify isolated systems that can avoid thermalization. Coupling to an external bath is expected to generically destroy MBL. However, in some cases dissipation is known to quench quantum dynamics, as in the case of spin boson model ^[1], which indicates that interplay between MBL and dissipation may be sometimes nontrivial.

References

1. A. Leggett, S. Chakravarty, A. Dorsey, M. Fisher, A. Garg, and W. Zwerger, Dynamics of the dissipative two-state system, Rev. Mod. Phys., vol. 59, p. 1, 1987