Cavity induced Many-body localization

Many-body localization (MBL) is an important avenue towards achieving novel non-equilibrium quantum control. In this talk, we investigate the possibility of achieving MBL in the context of cavity quantum electrodynamics, where localization is made difficult due to long-range interactions with the cavity mode. Contrary to this expectation, we find that MBL is stabilized by the cavity mode; at certain points, localization can even be induced by coupling a locally interacting thermalizing system to the global mode. Numerically, we show that the observed MBL persists to very small photon number (n ~ 2), well within the limit where the photons behave noticeably as quantum degrees of freedom.