Lifetimes of local excitations in disordered dipolar quantum systems

When a strongly disordered system of interacting quantum dipoles is locally excited, the excitation relaxes on some (potentially very long) timescale. We analyze this relaxation process, both for electron glasses with strong Coulomb interactions - in which particle-hole dipoles are emergent excitations - and for systems (e.g., quantum magnets or ultracold dipolar molecules) made up of microscopic dipoles. We consider both energy relaxation rates (T1 times) and dephasing rates (T2 times), and their dependence on frequency, temperature, and polarization. Systems in both two and three dimensions are considered, along with the dimensional crossover in quasi-two-dimensional geometries. A rich set of scaling laws is found.