No Arabic abstract
The existence of many-body mobility edges in closed quantum systems has been the focus of intense debate after the emergence of the description of the many-body localization phenomenon. Here we propose that this issue can be settled in experiments by investigating the time evolution of local degrees of freedom, tailored for specific energies and initial states. An interacting model of spinless fermions with exponentially long-ranged tunneling amplitudes, whose non-interacting version known to display single-particle mobility edges, is used as the starting point upon which nearest-neighbor interactions are included. We verify the manifestation of many-body mobility edges by using numerous probes, suggesting that one cannot explain their appearance as merely being a result of finite-size effects.
Precise nature of MBL transitions in both random and quasiperiodic (QP) systems remains elusive so far. In particular, whether MBL transitions in QP and random systems belong to the same universality class or two distinct ones has not been decisively resolved. Here we investigate MBL transitions in one-dimensional ($d!=!1$) QP systems as well as in random systems by state-of-the-art real-space renormalization group (RG) calculation. Our real-space RG shows that MBL transitions in 1D QP systems are characterized by the critical exponent $ u!approx!2.4$, which respects the Harris-Luck bound ($ u!>!1/d$) for QP systems. Note that $ u!approx! 2.4$ for QP systems also satisfies the Harris-CCFS bound ($ u!>!2/d$) for random systems, which implies that MBL transitions in 1D QP systems are stable against weak quenched disorder since randomness is Harris irrelevant at the transition. We shall briefly discuss experimental means to measure $ u$ of QP-induced MBL transitions.
We investigate dynamical quantum phase transitions in disordered quantum many-body models that can support many-body localized phases. Employing $l$-bits formalism, we lay out the conditions for which singularities indicative of the transitions appear in the context of many-body localization. Using the combination of the mapping onto $l$-bits and exact diagonalization results, we explicitly demonstrate the presence of these singularities for a candidate model that features many-body localization. Our work paves the way for understanding dynamical quantum phase transitions in the context of many-body localization, and elucidating whether different phases of the latter can be detected from analyzing the former. The results presented are experimentally accessible with state-of-the-art ultracold-atom and ion-trap setups.
Impurities, defects, and other types of imperfections are ubiquitous in realistic quantum many-body systems and essentially unavoidable in solid state materials. Often, such random disorder is viewed purely negatively as it is believed to prevent interesting new quantum states of matter from forming and to smear out sharp features associated with the phase transitions between them. However, disorder is also responsible for a variety of interesting novel phenomena that do not have clean counterparts. These include Anderson localization of single particle wave functions, many-body localization in isolated many-body systems, exotic quantum critical points, and glassy ground state phases. This brief review focuses on two separate but related subtopics in this field. First, we review under what conditions different types of randomness affect the stability of symmetry-broken low-temperature phases in quantum many-body systems and the stability of the corresponding phase transitions. Second, we discuss the fate of quantum phase transitions that are destabilized by disorder as well as the unconventional quantum Griffiths phases that emerge in their vicinity.
We investigate a spatial subsystem entropy extracted from the one-particle density matrix (OPDM) in one-dimensional disordered interacting fermions that host a many-body localized (MBL) phase. Deep in the putative MBL regime, this OPDM entropy exhibits the salient features of localization, despite not being a proper entanglement measure. We numerically show that the OPDM entropy of the eigenstates obeys an area law. Similar to the von-Neumann entropy, the OPDM entropy grows logarithmically with time after a quantum quench, albeit with a different prefactor. Both these features survive at moderately large interactions and well towards the transition into the ergodic phase. The computational cost to calculate the OPDM entropy scales only polynomially with the system size, suggesting that the OPDM provides a promising starting point for developing diagnostic tools for MBL in simulations and experiments.
Characterizing states of matter through the lens of their ergodic properties is a fascinating new direction of research. In the quantum realm, the many-body localization (MBL) was proposed to be the paradigmatic ergodicity breaking phenomenon, which extends the concept of Anderson localization to interacting systems. At the same time, random matrix theory has established a powerful framework for characterizing the onset of quantum chaos and ergodicity (or the absence thereof) in quantum many-body systems. Here we numerically study the spectral statistics of disordered interacting spin chains, which represent prototype models expected to exhibit MBL. We study the ergodicity indicator $g=log_{10}(t_{rm H}/t_{rm Th})$, which is defined through the ratio of two characteristic many-body time scales, the Thouless time $t_{rm Th}$ and the Heisenberg time $t_{rm H}$, and hence resembles the logarithm of the dimensionless conductance introduced in the context of Anderson localization. We argue that the ergodicity breaking transition in interacting spin chains occurs when both time scales are of the same order, $t_{rm Th} approx t_{rm H}$, and $g$ becomes a system-size independent constant. Hence, the ergodicity breaking transition in many-body systems carries certain analogies with the Anderson localization transition. Intriguingly, using a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless correlation length we observe a scaling solution of $g$ across the transition, which allows for detection of the crossing point in finite systems. We discuss the observation that scaled results in finite systems by increasing the system size exhibit a flow towards the quantum chaotic regime.