Fragile many-body ergodicity from action diffusion

Weakly nonintegrable many-body systems can restore ergodicity in distinctive ways depending on the range of the interaction network in action space. Action resonances seed chaotic dynamics into the networks. Long-range networks provide well connected resonances with ergodization controlled by the individual resonance chaos time scales. Short-range networks instead yield a dramatic slowing down of ergodization in action space, and lead to rare resonance diffusion. We use Josephson junction chains as a paradigmatic study case. We exploit finite time average distributions to characterize the thermalizing dynamics of actions. We identify an action resonance diffusion regime responsible for the slowing down. We extract the diffusion coefficient of that slow process and measure its dependence on the proximity to the integrable limit. Independent measures of correlation functions confirm our findings. The observed fragile diffusion is relying on weakly chaotic dynamics in spatially isolated action resonances. It can be suppressed, and ergodization delayed, by adding weak action noise, as a proof of concept.