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arXiv:1303.2012 · Physical Review B

Transition between localized and extended states in the hierarchical Anderson model

Fernando Lucas Metz, Luca Leuzzi, Giorgio Parisi A, Vincent Sacksteder

Published Jul 2, 2013• 13 citations
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Abstract

We present strong numerical evidence for the existence of a localization-delocalization transition in the eigenstates of the 1D Anderson model with long-range hierarchical hopping. Hierarchical models are important because of the well-known mapping between their phases and those of models with short-range hopping in higher dimensions, and also because the renormalization group can be applied exactly without the approximations that generally are required in other models. In the hierarchical Anderson model, we find a finite critical disorder strength ${W}_{c}$ where the average inverse participation ratio goes to zero; at small disorder, $W<{W}_{c}$, the model lies in a delocalized phase. This result is based on numerical calculation of the inverse participation ratio in the infinite volume limit using an exact renormalization group approach facilitated by the model's hierarchical structure. Our results are consistent with the presence of an Anderson transition in short-range models with $D>2$ dimensions, which was predicted using renormalization group arguments. Our finding should stimulate interest in the hierarchical Anderson model as a simplified and tractable model of the Anderson localization transition, which occurs in finite-dimensional systems with short-range hopping.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.88.045103

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We present strong numerical evidence for the existence of a localization-delocalization transition in the eigenstates of the 1D Anderson model with long-range hierarchical hopping. Hierarchical models are important because of the well-known mapping between their phases and those of models with short-range hopping in higher dimensions, and also because the renormalization group can be applied exactly without the approximations that generally are required in other models. In the hierarchical Anderson model, we find a finite critical disorder strength Wc{W}_{c}Wc​ where the average inverse participation ratio goes to zero; at small disorder, W<WcW<{W}_{c}W<Wc​, the model lies in a delocalized phase. This result is based on numerical calculation of the inverse participation ratio in the infinite volume limit using an exact renormalization group approach facilitated by the model's hierarchical structure. Our results are consistent with the presence of an Anderson transition in short-range models with D>2D>2D>2 dimensions, which was predicted using renormalization group arguments. Our finding should stimulate interest in the hierarchical Anderson model as a simplified and tractable model of the Anderson localization transition, which occurs in finite-dimensional systems with short-range hopping.
We study Anderson localisation on high-dimensional graphs with spatial structure induced by long-ranged but distance-dependent hopping. To this end, we introduce a class of models that interpolate between the short-range Anderson model on a random regular graph and fully connected models with statistically uniform hopping, by embedding a random regular graph into a complete graph and allowing hopping amplitudes to decay exponentially with graph distance. The competition between the exponentially growing number of neighbours with graph distance and the exponentially decaying hopping amplitude positions our models effectively as power-law hopping generalisation of the Anderson model on random regular graphs. Using a combination of numerical exact diagonalisation and analytical renormalised perturbation theory, we establish the resulting localisation phase diagram emerging from the interplay of the lengthscale associated to the hopping range and the onsite disorder strength. We find that increasing the hopping range shifts the localisation transition to stronger disorder, and that beyond a critical range the localised phase ceases to exist even at arbitrarily strong disorder. Our results indicate a direct Anderson transition between delocalised and localised phases, with no evidence for an intervening multifractal phase, for both deterministic and random hopping models. A scaling analysis based on inverse participation ratios reveals behaviour consistent with a Kosterlitz-Thouless-like transition with two-parameter scaling, in line with Anderson transitions on high-dimensional graphs. We also observe distinct critical behaviour in average and typical correlation functions, reflecting the different scaling properties of generalised inverse participation ratios.
We describe a large-disorder renormalization group (LDRG) method for the Anderson model of localization in one dimension which decimates eigenstates based on the size of their wave functions rather than their energy. We show that our LDRG scheme flows to infinite disorder, and thus becomes asymptotically exact. We use it to obtain the disorder-averaged inverse participation ratio (IPR) and density of states (DOS) for the entire spectrum. A modified scheme is formulated for higher dimensions, which is found to be less efficient, but capable of improvement.
We study the Loschmidt echo and the dynamical free energy of the Anderson model after a quench of the disorder strength. If the initial state is extended and the eigenstates of the postquench Hamiltonian are strongly localized, we argue that the Loschmidt echo exhibits zeros periodically with the period $2\ensuremath{\pi}/D$, where DDD is the width of spectra. At these zeros, the dynamical free energy diverges in a logarithmic way. We present numerical evidence of our argument in one- and three-dimensional Anderson models. Our findings connect the dynamical quantum phase transitions to the localization-delocalization phase transitions.
We study spectral and wave-function statistics for many-body localization transition in systems with long-range interactions decaying as $1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ with an exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ satisfying $d\ensuremath{\le}\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}2d$, where ddd is the spatial dimensionality. We refine earlier arguments and show that the system undergoes a localization transition as a function of the rescaled disorder ${W}^{*}=W/{L}^{2d\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}lnL$, where WWW is the disorder strength and LLL the system size. This transition has much in common with that on random regular graphs. We further perform a detailed analysis of the inverse participation ratio (IPR) of many-body wave functions, exploring how ergodic behavior in the delocalized phase switches to fractal one at the critical point and on the localized side of the transition. Our analytical results for the scaling of the critical disorder WWW with the system size LLL and for the scaling of IPR in the delocalized and localized phases are supported and corroborated by exact diagonalization of spin chains.
For short-ranged disordered quantum models in one dimension, the Many-Body-Localization is analyzed via the adaptation to the Many-Body context [M. Serbyn, Z. Papic and D.A. Abanin, PRX 5, 041047 (2015)] of the Thouless point of view on the Anderson transition : the question is whether a local interaction between two long chains is able to reshuffle completely the eigenstates (Delocalized phase with a volume-law entanglement) or whether the hybridization between tensor states remains limited (Many-Body-Localized Phase with an area-law entanglement). The central object is thus the level of Hybridization induced by the matrix elements of local operators, as compared with the difference of diagonal energies. The multifractal analysis of these matrix elements of local operators is used to analyze the corresponding statistics of resonances. Our main conclusion is that the critical point is characterized by the Strong-Multifractality Spectrum f(0≤α≤2)=α2f(0 \leq \alpha \leq 2)=\frac{\alpha}{2}f(0≤α≤2)=2α​, well known in the context of Anderson Localization in spaces of effective infinite dimensionality, where the size of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the volume. As a consequence, the level statistics at criticality is the closest possible to the Poisson statistics of the Localized phase, and the Delocalized phase near the critical point is not ergodic.
We consider the one-dimensional lattice model of interacting fermions with disorder studied previously by Oganesyan and Huse [Phys. Rev. B 75, 155111 (2007)]. To characterize a possible many-body localization transition as a function of the disorder strength WWW, we use an exact renormalization procedure in configuration space that generalizes the Aoki real-space renormalization procedure for Anderson localization one-particle models [H. Aoki, J. Phys. C 13, 3369 (1980)]. We focus on the statistical properties of the renormalized hopping VL{V}_{L}VL​ between two configurations separated by a distance LLL in configuration space (distance being defined as the minimal number of elementary moves to go from one configuration to the other). Our numerical results point toward the existence of a many-body localization transition at a finite disorder strength Wc{W}_{c}Wc​. In the localized phase W>WcW>{W}_{c}W>Wc​, the typical renormalized hopping ${V}_{L}^{typ}\ensuremath{\equiv}{e}^{\overline{\text{ln}\text{ }{V}_{L}}}$ decays exponentially in LLL as $(\text{ln}\text{ }{V}_{L}^{typ})\ensuremath{\simeq}\ensuremath{-}\frac{L}{{\ensuremath{\xi}}_{loc}}$ and the localization length diverges as ${\ensuremath{\xi}}_{loc}(W)\ensuremath{\sim}{(W\ensuremath{-}{W}_{c})}^{\ensuremath{-}{\ensuremath{\nu}}_{loc}}$ with a critical exponent of order ${\ensuremath{\nu}}_{loc}\ensuremath{\simeq}0.45$. In the delocalized phase W<WcW<{W}_{c}W<Wc​, the renormalized hopping remains a finite random variable as $L\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$ and the typical asymptotic value ${V}_{\ensuremath{\infty}}^{typ}\ensuremath{\equiv}{e}^{\overline{\text{ln}\text{ }{V}_{\ensuremath{\infty}}}}$ presents an essential singularity $(\text{ln}\text{ }{V}_{\ensuremath{\infty}}^{typ})\ensuremath{\sim}\ensuremath{-}{({W}_{c}\ensuremath{-}W)}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\kappa}}$ with an exponent of order $\ensuremath{\kappa}\ensuremath{\sim}1.4$. Finally, we show that this analysis in configuration space is compatible with the localization properties of the simplest two-point correlation function in real space.