Local constants of motion imply information propagation

Abstract

Interacting quantum many-body systems are expected to thermalize, in the sense that the evolution of local expectation values approaches a stationary value resembling a thermal ensemble. This intuition is notably contradicted in systems exhibiting many-body localisation (MBL). In stark contrast to the non- interacting case of Anderson localisation, the entanglement of states grows without limit over time, albeit slowly. In this work, we establish a novel link between quantum information theory and notions of condensed matter physics, capturing this phenomenon in the Heisenberg picture. We show that the mere existence of local constants of motion, often taken as the defining property of MBL, together with a generic spectrum of the Hamiltonian, is already sufficient to rigorously prove information propagation: these systems can be used to send a classical bit over arbitrary distances, in that the impact of a local perturbation can be detected arbitrarily far away. This counterintuitive result is compatible with and further corroborates the intuition of a slow entanglement growth following global quenches in MBL systems. We perform a detailed perturbation analysis of quasi-local constants of motion and also show that they indeed can be used to construct efficient spectral tensor networks, as recently suggested. Our results provide a detailed and at the same time model-independent picture of information propagation in MBL systems.