No Arabic abstract
The quantum mechanical position operators, and their products, are not well-defined in systems obeying periodic boundary conditions. Here we extend the work of Resta who developed a formalism to calculate the electronic polarization as an expectation value of a many-body operator, to include higher multipole moments, e.g., quadrupole and octupole. We define $n$-th order multipole operators whose expectation values can be used to calculate the $n$-th multipole moment when all of the lower moments are vanishing (modulo a quantum). We show that changes in our operators are tied to flows of $n-1$-st multipole currents, and encode the adiabatic evolution of the system in the presence of an $n-1$-st gradient of the electric field. Finally, we test our operators on a set of tightbinding models to show that they correctly determine the phase diagrams of topological quadrupole and octupole models, capture an adiabatic quadrupole pump, and distinguish a bulk quadrupole moment from other mechanisms that generate corner charges.
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.
In this article we extend the celebrated Berry-phase formulation of electric polarization in crystals to higher electric multipole moments. We determine the necessary conditions under which, and minimal models in which, the quadrupole and octupole moments are topologically quantized electromagnetic observables. Such systems exhibit gapped boundaries that are themselves lower-dimensional topological phases. Furthermore, they manifest topologically protected corner states carrying fractional charge, i.e., fractionalization at the boundary of the boundary. To characterize these new insulating phases of matter, we introduce a new paradigm whereby `nested Wilson loops give rise to a large number of new topological invariants that have been previously overlooked. We propose three realistic experimental implementations of this new topological behavior that can be immediately tested.
Quantum coherence quantifies the amount of superposition a quantum state can have in a given basis. Since there is a difference in the structure of eigenstates of the ergodic and many-body localized systems, we expect them also to differ in terms of their coherences in a given basis. Here, we numerically calculate different measures of quantum coherence in the excited eigenstates of an interacting disordered Hamiltonian as a function of the disorder. We show that quantum coherence can be used as an order parameter to detect the well-studied ergodic to many-body-localized phase transition. We also perform quantum quench studies to distinguish the behavior of coherence in thermalized and localized phases. We then present a protocol to calculate measurement-based localizable coherence to investigate the thermal and many-body localized phases. The protocol allows one to investigate quantum correlations experimentally in a non-destructive way, in contrast to measures that require tracing out a subsystem, which always destroys coherence and correlation.
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.
We develop the perturbation theory of the fidelity susceptibility in biorthogonal bases for arbitrary interacting non-Hermitian many-body systems with real eigenvalues. The quantum criticality in the non-Hermitian transverse field Ising chain is investigated by the second derivative of ground-state energy and the ground-state fidelity susceptibility. We show that the system undergoes a second-order phase transition with the Ising universal class by numerically computing the critical points and the critical exponents from the finite-size scaling theory. Interestingly, our results indicate that the biorthogonal quantum phase transitions are described by the biorthogonal fidelity susceptibility instead of the conventional fidelity susceptibility.