Coherence controls the visibility of frozen disorder in an open quantum chain

arXiv:2611.00832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A Gaussian position distribution need not imply that frozen disorder is irrelevant. We study a resonant quantum chain where neighboring sites couple with opposite signs to auxiliary states that decay with frozen, random return probabilities. Lowering dephasing spreads the effect of each local return bias over more sites. We take dephasing to zero at a fixed, sufficiently weak disorder amplitude. On the scale of a coherent wave packet, the position distribution approaches the same Gaussian for almost every frozen sample. At larger distances and later times, it remains sample dependent and is described by diffusion in a random potential with Brownian spatial statistics.