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Abstract

How a closed system thermalizes, especially in the absence of global conservation laws but in the presence of disorder and interactions, is one of the central questions in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics. We explore this for a disordered, periodically driven Ising chain. Our numerical results reveal inhomogeneous thermalization leading to a distribution of thermalization timescales within a single disordered sample, which we encode via a distribution of effective local temperatures. Using this, we find an excellent collapse without any fitting parameters of the local relaxation dynamics for the entire range of disorder values in the ergodic regime when adapting the disorder-averaged diagonal entanglement entropy as internal "time" of the system. This approach evidences a remarkably uniform parametrization of the dynamical many-body evolution of local temperature within the otherwise highly heterogeneous ergodic regime, independent of the strength of the disorder.