Interacting quantum many-body systems are usually expected to thermalise, in the sense that the evolution of local expectation values approach a stationary value resembling a thermal ensemble. This intuition is notably contradicted in systems exhibit
ing many-body localisation, a phenomenon receiving significant recent attention. One of its most intriguing features is that, in stark contrast to the non-interacting case, entanglement of states grows without limit over time, albeit slowly. In this work, we establish a novel link between quantum information theory and notions of condensed matter, capturing the phenomenon in the Heisenberg picture. We show that the existence of local constants of motion, often taken as the defining property of many-body localisation, together with a generic spectrum, is sufficient to rigorously prove information propagation: These systems can be used to send a signal over arbitrary distances, in that the impact of a local perturbation can be detected arbitrarily far away. We perform a detailed perturbation analysis of quasi-local constants of motion and also show that they indeed can be used to construct efficient spectral tensor networks, as recently suggested. Our results provide a detailed and model-independent picture of information propagation in many-body localised systems.
The phenomenon of many-body localisation received a lot of attention recently, both for its implications in condensed-matter physics of allowing systems to be an insulator even at non-zero temperature as well as in the context of the foundations of q
uantum statistical mechanics, providing examples of systems showing the absence of thermalisation following out-of-equilibrium dynamics. In this work, we establish a novel link between dynamical properties - the absence of a group velocity and transport - with entanglement properties of individual eigenvectors. Using Lieb-Robinson bounds and filter functions, we prove rigorously under simple assumptions on the spectrum that if a system shows strong dynamical localisation, all of its many-body eigenvectors have clustering correlations. In one dimension this implies directly an entanglement area law, hence the eigenvectors can be approximated by matrix-product states. We also show this statement for parts of the spectrum, allowing for the existence of a mobility edge above which transport is possible.
We study one-dimensional quantum walks in a homogeneous electric field. The field is given by a phase which depends linearly on position and is applied after each step. The long time propagation properties of this system, such as revivals, ballistic
expansion and Anderson localization, depend very sensitively on the value of the electric field $Phi$, e.g., on whether $Phi/(2pi)$ is rational or irrational. We relate these properties to the continued fraction expansion of the field. When the field is given only with finite accuracy, the beginning of the expansion allows analogous conclusions about the behavior on finite time scales.
We study a spin-1/2-particle moving on a one dimensional lattice subject to disorder induced by a random, space-dependent quantum coin. The discrete time evolution is given by a family of random unitary quantum walk operators, where the shift operati
on is assumed to be deterministic. Each coin is an independent identically distributed random variable with values in the group of two dimensional unitary matrices. We derive sufficient conditions on the probability distribution of the coins such that the system exhibits dynamical localization. Put differently, the tunneling probability between two lattice sites decays rapidly for almost all choices of random coins and after arbitrary many time steps with increasing distance. Our findings imply that this effect takes place if the coin is chosen at random from the Haar measure, or some measure continuous with respect to it, but also for a class of discrete probability measures which support consists of two coins, one of them being the Hadamard coin.
We study the asymptotic position distribution of general quantum walks on a lattice, including walks with a random coin, which is chosen from step to step by a general Markov chain. In the unitary (i.e., non-random) case, we allow any unitary operato
r, which commutes with translations, and couples only sites at a finite distance from each other. For example, a single step of the walk could be composed of any finite succession of different shift and coin operations in the usual sense, with any lattice dimension and coin dimension. We find ballistic scaling, and establish a direct method for computing the asymptotic distribution of position divided by time, namely as the distribution of the discrete time analog of the group velocity. In the random case, we let a Markov chain (control process) pick in each step one of finitely many unitary walks, in the sense described above. In ballistic order we find a non-random drift, which depends only on the mean of the control process and not on the initial state. In diffusive scaling the limiting distribution is asymptotically Gaussian, with a covariance matrix (diffusion matrix) depending on momentum. The diffusion matrix depends not only on the mean but also on the transition rates of the control process. In the non-random limit, i.e., when the coins chosen are all very close, or the transition rates of the control process are small, leading to long intervals of ballistic evolution, the diffusion matrix diverges. Our method is based on spatial Fourier transforms, and the first and second order perturbation theory of the eigenvalue 1 of the transition operator for each value of the momentum.
