Slow thermalization and subdiffusion in $U(1)$ conserving Floquet random circuits

Abstract: Random quantum circuits are paradigmatic models of minimally structured and analytically tractable chaotic dynamics. We study a family of Floquet unitary circuits with Haar random $U(1)$ charge conserving dynamics; the minimal such model has nearest-neighbor gates acting on spin 1/2 qubits, and a single layer of even/odd gates repeated periodically in time. We find that this minimal model is not robustly thermalizing at numerically accessible system sizes, and displays slow subdiffusive dynamics for long times. We map out the thermalization dynamics in a broader parameter space of charge conserving circuits, and understand the origin of the slow dynamics in terms of proximate localized and integrable regimes in parameter space. In contrast, we find that small extensions to the minimal model are sufficient to achieve robust thermalization; these include (i) increasing the interaction range to three-site gates (ii) increasing the local Hilbert space dimension by appending an additional unconstrained qubit to the conserved charge on each site, or (iii) using a larger Floquet period comprised of two independent layers of gates. Our results should inform future numerical studies of charge conserving circuits which are relevant for a wide range of topical theoretical questions.