Studying many-body localization in exchange-coupled electron spin qubits using spin-spin correlations

Abstract: We show that many-body localization (MBL) effects can be observed in a finite chain of exchange-coupled spin qubits in the presence of both exchange and magnetic noise, a system that has been experimentally realized in semiconductors and is a potential solid-state quantum computing platform. In addition to established measures of MBL, the level spacing ratio and the entanglement entropy, we propose another quantity, the spin-spin correlation function, that can be measured experimentally and is particularly well-suited to experiments in semiconductor-based electron spin qubit systems. We show that, in cases that the established measures detect as delocalized "phases", the spin-spin correlation functions retain no memory of the system's initial state (i.e., the long-time value deviates significantly from the initial value), but that they do retain memory in cases that the established measures detect as localized "phases". We also discover an interesting counterintuitive result that there is no clear tendency towards localization with increasing charge noise in small systems ($3$--$10$ spins). The proposed experiments should be feasible in the existing semiconductor spin qubit systems.