We investigate disordered graphene with strong long-range impurities. Contrary to the common belief that delocalization should persist in such a system against any disorder, as the system is ex-pected to be equivalent to a disordered two-dimensional Dirac Fermionic system, we find that states near the Dirac points are localized for sufficiently strong disorder and the transition between the localized and delocalized states is of Kosterlitz-Thouless type. Our results show that the transition originates from bounding and unbounding of local current vortices.
We propose a scaling theory for the many-body localization (MBL) phase transition in one dimension, building on the idea that it proceeds via a quantum avalanche. We argue that the critical properties can be captured at a coarse-grained level by a Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) renormalization group (RG) flow. On phenomenological grounds, we identify the scaling variables as the density of thermal regions and the lengthscale that controls the decay of typical matrix elements. Within this KT picture, the MBL phase is a line of fixed points that terminates at the delocalization transition. We discuss two possible scenarios distinguished by the distribution of rare, fractal thermal inclusions within the MBL phase. In the first scenario, these regions have a stretched exponential distribution in the MBL phase. In the second scenario, the near-critical MBL phase hosts rare thermal regions that are power-law distributed in size. This points to the existence of a second transition within the MBL phase, at which these power-laws change to the stretched exponential form expected at strong disorder. We numerically simulate two different phenomenological RGs previously proposed to describe the MBL transition. Both RGs display a universal power-law length distribution of thermal regions at the transition with a critical exponent $alpha_c=2$, and continuously varying exponents in the MBL phase consistent with the KT picture.
The Anderson delocalization-localization transition is studied in multilayered systems with randomly placed interlayer bonds of density $p$ and strength $t$. In the absence of diagonal disorder (W=0), following an appropriate perturbation expansion, we estimate the mean free paths in the main directions and verify by scaling of the conductance that the states remain extended for any finite $p$, despite the interlayer disorder. In the presence of additional diagonal disorder ($W > 0$) we obtain an Anderson transition with critical disorder $W_c$ and localization length exponent $ u$ independently of the direction. The critical conductance distribution $P_{c}(g)$ varies, however, for the parallel and the perpendicular directions. The results are discussed in connection to disordered anisotropic materials.
Thermal and many-body localized phases are separated by a dynamical phase transition of a new kind. We analyze the distribution of off-diagonal matrix elements of local operators across the many-body localization transition (MBLT) in a disordered spin chain, and use it to characterize the breakdown of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis and to extract the many-body Thouless energy. We find a wide critical region around the MBLT, where Thouless energy becomes smaller than the level spacing, while matrix elements show critical dependence on the energy difference. In the same region, matrix elements, viewed as amplitudes of a fictitious wave function, exhibit strong multifractality. Our findings show that the correlation length becomes larger than the accessible system sizes in a broad range of disorder strength values, and shed light on the critical behaviour of MBL systems.
The notion of Thouless energy plays a central role in the theory of Anderson localization. We investigate the scaling of Thouless energy across the many-body localization (MBL) transition in a Floquet model. We use a combination of methods that are reliable on the ergodic side of the transition (e.g., spectral form factor) and methods that work on the MBL side (e.g. typical matrix elements of local operators) to obtain a complete picture of the Thouless energy behavior across the transition. On the ergodic side, the Thouless energy tends to a value independent of system size, while at the transition it becomes comparable to the level spacing. Different probes yield consistent estimates of the Thouless energy in their overlapping regime of applicability, giving the location of the transition point nearly free of finite-size drift. This work establishes a connection between different definitions of Thouless energy in a many-body setting, and yields new insights into the MBL transition in Floquet systems.
Spectral statistics of disordered systems encode Thouless and Heisenberg time scales whose ratio determines whether the system is chaotic or localized. Identifying similarities between system size and disorder strength scaling of Thouless time for disordered quantum many-body systems with results for 3D and 5D Anderson models, we argue that the two-parameter scaling breaks down in the vicinity of the transition to the localized phase signalling subdiffusive dynamics.