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arXiv:1308.6263 · Communications in Mathematical Physics

Asymptotic Quantum Many-Body Localization from Thermal Disorder

Wojciech De Roeck, François Huveneers

Published Jul 25, 2014• 97 citations
arXivHTMLPDF
DOI
10.1007/s00220-014-2116-8

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Abstract Statistical mechanics provides a framework for describing the physics of large, complex many-body systems using only a few macroscopic parameters to determine the state of the system. For isolated quantum many-body systems, such a description is achieved via the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), which links thermalization, ergodicity and quantum chaotic behavior. However, tendency towards thermalization is not observed at finite system sizes and evolution times in a robust many-body localization (MBL) regime found numerically and experimentally in the dynamics of interacting many-body systems at strong disorder. Although the phenomenology of the MBL regime is well-established, the central question remains unanswered: under what conditions does the MBL regime give rise to an MBL phase , in which the thermalization does not occur even in the asymptotic limit of infinite system size and evolution time? This review focuses on recent numerical investigations aiming to clarify the status of the MBL phase, and it establishes the critical open questions about the dynamics of disordered many-body systems. The last decades of research have brought an unprecedented new variety of tools and indicators to study the breakdown of ergodicity, ranging from spectral and wave function measures, matrix elements of observables, through quantities probing unitary quantum dynamics, to transport and quantum information measures. We give a comprehensive overview of these approaches and attempt to provide a unified understanding of their main features. We emphasize general trends towards ergodicity with increasing length and time scales, which exclude naive single-parameter scaling hypothesis, necessitate the use of more refined scaling procedures, and prevent unambiguous extrapolations of numerical results to the asymptotic limit. Providing a concise description of numerical methods for studying ETH and MBL, we explore various approaches to tackle the question of the MBL phase. Persistent finite size drifts towards ergodicity consistently emerge in quantities derived from eigenvalues and eigenvectors of disordered many-body systems. The drifts are related to continuous inching towards ergodicity and non-vanishing transport observed in the dynamics of many-body systems, even at strong disorder. These phenomena impede the understanding of microscopic processes at the ETH-MBL crossover. Nevertheless, the abrupt slowdown of dynamics with increasing disorder strength provides premises suggesting the proximity of the MBL phase. This review concludes that the questions about thermalization and its failure in disordered many-body systems remain a captivating area open for further explorations.
The many-body localised (MBL) to thermal crossover observed in exact diagonalisation studies remains poorly understood as the accessible system sizes are too small to be in an asymptotic scaling regime. We develop a model of the crossover in short 1D chains in which the MBL phase is destabilised by the formation of many-body resonances. The model reproduces several properties of the numerically observed crossover, including an apparent correlation length exponent \nu=1 ν = 1 , exponential growth of the Thouless time with disorder strength, linear drift of the critical disorder strength with system size, scale-free resonances, apparent 1/\omega 1 / ω dependence of disorder-averaged spectral functions, and sub-thermal entanglement entropy of small subsystems. In the crossover, resonances induced by a local perturbation are rare at numerically accessible system sizes L L which are smaller than a \lambda λ . For L \gg \sqrt{\lambda} L ≫ λ (in lattice units), resonances typically overlap, and this model does not describe the asymptotic transition. The model further reproduces controversial numerical observations which Refs. claimed to be inconsistent with MBL. We thus argue that the numerics to date is consistent with a MBL phase in the thermodynamic limit.