No Arabic abstract
By varying the disorder realisation in the many-body localised (MBL) phase, we investigate the influence of resonances on spectral properties. The standard theory of the MBL phase is based on the existence of local integrals of motion (LIOM), and eigenstates of the time evolution operator can be described as LIOM configurations. We show that smooth variations of the disorder give rise to avoided level crossings, and we identify these with resonances between LIOM configurations. Through this parametric approach, we develop a theory for resonances in terms of standard properties of non-resonant LIOM. This framework describes resonances that are locally pairwise, and is appropriate in arbitrarily large systems deep within the MBL phase. We show that resonances are associated with large level curvatures on paths through the ensemble of disorder realisations, and we determine the curvature distribution. By considering the level repulsion associated with resonances we calculate the two-point correlator of the level density. We also find the distributions of matrix elements of local observables and discuss implications for low-frequency dynamics.
The interplay of interactions and strong disorder can lead to an exotic quantum many-body localized (MBL) phase. Beyond the absence of transport, the MBL phase has distinctive signatures, such as slow dephasing and logarithmic entanglement growth; they commonly result in slow and subtle modification of the dynamics, making their measurement challenging. Here, we experimentally characterize these properties of the MBL phase in a system of coupled superconducting qubits. By implementing phase sensitive techniques, we map out the structure of local integrals of motion in the MBL phase. Tomographic reconstruction of single and two qubit density matrices allowed us to determine the spatial and temporal entanglement growth between the localized sites. In addition, we study the preservation of entanglement in the MBL phase. The interferometric protocols implemented here measure affirmative correlations and allow us to exclude artifacts due to the imperfect isolation of the system. By measuring elusive MBL quantities, our work highlights the advantages of phase sensitive measurements in studying novel phases of matter.
We numerically study both the avalanche instability and many-body resonances in strongly-disordered spin chains exhibiting many-body localization (MBL). We distinguish between a finite-size/time MBL regime, and the asymptotic MBL phase, and identify some landmarks within the MBL regime. Our first landmark is an estimate of where the MBL phase becomes unstable to avalanches, obtained by measuring the slowest relaxation rate of a finite chain coupled to an infinite bath at one end. Our estimates indicate that the actual MBL-to-thermal phase transition, in infinite-length systems, occurs much deeper in the MBL regime than has been suggested by most previous studies. Our other landmarks involve system-wide resonances. We find that the effective matrix elements producing eigenstates with system-wide resonances are enormously broadly distributed. This means that the onset of such resonances in typical samples occurs quite deep in the MBL regime, and the first such resonances typically involve rare pairs of eigenstates that are farther apart in energy than the minimum gap. Thus we find that the resonance properties define two landmarks that divide the MBL regime in to three subregimes: (i) at strongest disorder, typical samples do not have any eigenstates that are involved in system-wide many-body resonances; (ii) there is a substantial intermediate regime where typical samples do have such resonances, but the pair of eigenstates with the minimum spectral gap does not; and (iii) in the weaker randomness regime, the minimum gap is involved in a many-body resonance and thus subject to level repulsion. Nevertheless, even in this third subregime, all but a vanishing fraction of eigenstates remain non-resonant and the system thus still appears MBL in many respects. Based on our estimates of the location of the avalanche instability, it might be that the MBL phase is only part of subregime (i).
Quantum phase transitions are usually observed in ground states of correlated systems. Remarkably, eigenstate phase transitions can also occur at finite energy density in disordered, isolated quantum systems. Such transitions fall outside the framework of statistical mechanics as they involve the breakdown of ergodicity. Here, we consider what general constraints can be imposed on the nature of eigenstate transitions due to the presence of disorder. We derive Harris-type bounds on the finite-size scaling exponents of the mean entanglement entropy and level statistics at the many-body localization phase transition using several different arguments. Our results are at odds with recent small-size numerics, for which we estimate the crossover scales beyond which the Harris bound must hold.
Many-body localized (MBL) systems lie outside the framework of statistical mechanics, as they fail to equilibrate under their own quantum dynamics. Even basic features of MBL systems such as their stability to thermal inclusions and the nature of the dynamical transition to thermalizing behavior remain poorly understood. We study a simple model to address these questions: a two level system interacting with strength $J$ with $Ngg 1$ localized bits subject to random fields. On increasing $J$, the system transitions from a MBL to a delocalized phase on the emph{vanishing} scale $J_c(N) sim 1/N$, up to logarithmic corrections. In the transition region, the single-site eigenstate entanglement entropies exhibit bi-modal distributions, so that localized bits are either on (strongly entangled) or off (weakly entangled) in eigenstates. The clusters of on bits vary significantly between eigenstates of the emph{same} sample, which provides evidence for a heterogenous discontinuous transition out of the localized phase in single-site observables. We obtain these results by perturbative mapping to bond percolation on the hypercube at small $J$ and by numerical exact diagonalization of the full many-body system. Our results imply the MBL phase is unstable in systems with short-range interactions and quenched randomness in dimensions $d$ that are high but finite.
We theoretically study the response of a many-body localized system to a local quench from a quantum information perspective. We find that the local quench triggers entanglement growth throughout the whole system, giving rise to a logarithmic lightcone. This saturates the modified Lieb-Robinson bound for quantum information propagation in many-body localized systems previously conjectured based on the existence of local integrals of motion. In addition, near the localization-delocalization transition, we find that the final states after the local quench exhibit volume-law entanglement. We also show that the local quench induces a deterministic orthogonality catastrophe for highly excited eigenstates, where the typical wave-function overlap between the pre- and post-quench eigenstates decays {it exponentially} with the system size.