Entanglement dynamics of a many-body localized system coupled to a bath

Abstract: The combination of strong disorder and interactions in closed quantum systems can lead to many-body localization (MBL). However this quantum phase is not stable when the system is coupled to a thermal environment. We investigate how MBL is destroyed in systems that are weakly coupled to a dephasive Markovian environment by focusing on their entanglement dynamics. We numerically study the third R\'{e}nyi negativity $R_3$, a recently proposed entanglement proxy based on the negativity that captures the unbounded logarithmic growth in the closed case and that can be computed efficiently with tensor networks. We also show that the decay of $R_3$ follows a stretched exponential law, similarly to the imbalance, with however a smaller stretching exponent.