No Arabic abstract
We study the (de)localization phenomena of one-component lattice fermions in spin backgrounds. The O(3) classical spin variables on sites fluctuate thermally through the ordinary nearest-neighbor coupling. Their complex two-component (CP$^1$-Schwinger boson) representation forms a composite U(1) gauge field on bond, which acts on fermions as a fluctuating hopping amplitude in a gauge invariant manner. For the case of antiferromagnetic (AF) spin coupling, the model has close relationship with the $t$-$J$ model of strongly-correlated electron systems. We measure the unfolded level spacing distribution of fermion energy eigenvalues and the participation ratio of energy eigenstates. The results for AF spin couplings suggest a possibility that, in two dimensions, all the energy eigenstates are localized. In three dimensions, we find that there exists a mobility edge, and estimate the critical temperature $T_{ss LD}(delta)$ of the localization-delocalization transition at the fermion concentration $delta$.
We study the finite-energy density phase diagram of spinless fermions with attractive interactions in one dimension in the presence of uncorrelated diagonal disorder. Unlike the case of repulsive interactions, a delocalized Luttinger-liquid phase persists at weak disorder in the ground state, which is a well-known result. We revisit the ground-state phase diagram and show that the recently introduced occupation-spectrum discontinuity computed from the eigenspectrum of one-particle density matrices is noticeably smaller in the Luttinger liquid compared to the localized regions. Moreover, we use the functional renormalization scheme to study the finite-size dependence of the conductance, which resolves the existence of the Luttinger liquid as well and is computationally cheap. Our main results concern the finite-energy density case. Using exact diagonalization and by computing various established measures of the many-body localization-delocalization transition, we argue that the zero-temperature Luttinger liquid smoothly evolves into a finite-energy density ergodic phase without any intermediate phase transition.
A combined analytical and numerical study is performed of the mapping between strongly interacting fermions and weakly interacting spins, in the framework of the Hubbard, t-J and Heisenberg models. While for spatially homogeneous models in the thermodynamic limit the mapping is thoroughly understood, we here focus on aspects that become relevant in spatially inhomogeneous situations, such as the effect of boundaries, impurities, superlattices and interfaces. We consider parameter regimes that are relevant for traditional applications of these models, such as electrons in cuprates and manganites, and for more recent applications to atoms in optical lattices. The rate of the mapping as a function of the interaction strength is determined from the Bethe-Ansatz for infinite systems and from numerical diagonalization for finite systems. We show analytically that if translational symmetry is broken through the presence of impurities, the mapping persists and is, in a certain sense, as local as possible, provided the spin-spin interaction between two sites of the Heisenberg model is calculated from the harmonic mean of the onsite Coulomb interaction on adjacent sites of the Hubbard model. Numerical calculations corroborate these findings also in interfaces and superlattices, where analytical calculations are more complicated.
We propose a realization of the one-dimensional random dimer model and certain N-leg generalizations using cold atoms in an optical lattice. We show that these models exhibit multiple delocalization energies that depend strongly on the symmetry properties of the corresponding Hamiltonian and we provide analytical and numerical results for the localization length as a function of energy. We demonstrate that the N-leg systems possess similarities with their 1D ancestors but are demonstrably distinct. The existence of critical delocalization energies leads to dips in the momentum distribution which serve as a clear signal of the localization-delocalization transition. These momentum distributions are different for models with different group symmetries and are identical for those with the same symmetry.
Electron-electron interactions in general lead to both ground state and excited state confinement. We show, however, that in phenyl-substituted polyacetylenes electron-electron interactions cause enhanced delocalization of quasiparticles in the optically excited state from the backbone polyene chain into the phenyl groups, which in turn leads to enhanced confinement in the chain direction. This co-operative delocalization--confinement lowers the energy of the one-photon state and raises the relative energy of the lowest two-photon state. The two-photon state is slightly below the optical state in mono-phenyl substituted polyacetylenes, but above the optical state in di-phenyl substituted polyacetylenes, thereby explaining the strong photoluminescence of the latter class of materials. We present a detailed mechanism of the crossover in the energies of the one- and two-photon states in these systems. In addition, we calculate the optical absorption spectra over a wide wavelength region, and make specific predictions for the polarizations of low and high energy transitions that can be tested on oriented samples. Within existing theories of light emission from $pi$-conjugated polymers, strong photoluminescence should be restricted to materials whose optical gaps are larger than that of trans-polyacetylene. The present work show that conceptually at least, it is possible to have light emission from systems with smaller optical gaps.
We present a fully analytical description of a many body localization (MBL) transition in a microscopically defined model. Its Hamiltonian is the sum of one- and two-body operators, where both contributions obey a maximum-entropy principle and have no symmetries except hermiticity (not even particle number conservation). These two criteria paraphrase that our system is a variant of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model. We will demonstrate how this simple `zero-dimensional system displays numerous features seen in more complex realizations of MBL. Specifically, it shows a transition between an ergodic and a localized phase, and non-trivial wave function statistics indicating the presence of `non-ergodic extended states. We check our analytical description of these phenomena by parameter free comparison to high performance numerics for systems of up to $N=15$ fermions. In this way, our study becomes a testbed for concepts of high-dimensional quantum localization, previously applied to synthetic systems such as Cayley trees or random regular graphs. We believe that this is the first many body system for which an effective theory is derived and solved from first principles. The hope is that the novel analytical concepts developed in this study may become a stepping stone for the description of MBL in more complex systems.