While there are well-established methods to study delocalization transitions of single particles in random systems, it remains a challenging problem how to characterize many-body delocalization transitions. Here, we use a generalized real-space renormalization group technique to study the anisotropic Heisenberg model with long-range interactions, decaying with a power α , which are generated by placing spins at random positions along the chain. This method permits a large-scale finite-size scaling analysis. We examine the full distribution function of the excitation energy gap from the ground state and observe a crossover with decreasing α . At α c the full distribution coincides with a critical function. Thereby, we find strong evidence for the existence of a many-body localization transition in disordered antiferromagnetic spin chains with long-range interactions.
We theoretically investigate the many-body localization phase transition in a one-dimensional Ising spin chain with random long-range spin-spin interactions, ${V}_{ij}\ensuremath{\propto}{\left|i\ensuremath{-}j\right|}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, where the exponent of the interaction range $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ can be tuned from zero to infinitely large. By using exact diagonalization, we calculate the half-chain entanglement entropy and the energy spectral statistics and use them to characterize the phase transition towards the many-body localization phase at infinite temperature and at sufficiently large disorder strength. We perform finite-size scaling to extract the critical disorder strength and the critical exponent of the divergent localization length. With increasing $\ensuremath{\alpha}$, the critical exponent experiences a sharp increase at about ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}\ensuremath{\simeq}1.2$ and then gradually decreases to a value found earlier in a disordered short-ranged interacting spin chain. For $\ensuremath{\alpha}<{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$, we find that the system is mostly localized and the increase in the disorder strength may drive a transition between two many-body localized phases. In contrast, for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>{\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$, the transition is from a thermalized phase to the many-body localization phase. Our predictions could be experimentally tested with an ion-trap quantum emulator with programmable random long-range interactions, or with randomly distributed Rydberg atoms or polar molecules in lattices.
We investigate many-body localization in the chain of interacting spins with a transverse power-law interaction, ${J}_{0}/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, and random on-site potentials, ${\ensuremath{\phi}}_{i}\ensuremath{\in}\left(\ensuremath{-}W/2,W/2\right)$, in the long-range limit, $\ensuremath{\alpha}<3/2$, which has been recently examined experimentally on trapped ions. The many-body localization threshold is characterized by the critical disordering,
Wc, which separates localized (
W>Wc) and chaotic (
W<Wc) phases. Using the analysis of the instability of localized states with respect to resonant interactions complemented by numerical finite-size scaling, we show that the critical disordering scales with the number of spins,
N, as ${W}_{c}\ensuremath{\approx}[1.37{J}_{0}/(4/3\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha})]{N}^{4/3\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}lnN$ for $0<\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\le}1$, and as ${W}_{c}\ensuremath{\approx}[{J}_{0}/(1\ensuremath{-}2\ensuremath{\alpha}/3)]{N}^{1\ensuremath{-}2\ensuremath{\alpha}/3}{ln}^{2/3}N$ for $1<\ensuremath{\alpha}<3/2$, while the transition width scales as ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{W}\ensuremath{\propto}{W}_{c}/N$. We use this result to predict the spin long-term evolution for a very large number of spins (
N=50), inaccessible for exact diagonalization, and to suggest the rescaling of hopping interaction with the system size to attain the localization transition at finite disordering in the thermodynamic limit of infinite number of spins.
We introduce and implement a reformulation of the strong-disorder renormalization group method in real space, well suited to study bond-disordered antiferromagnetic power-law coupled quantum spin chains. We apply it to a chain of randomly placed spins coupled by power-law long-range interaction with power $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. First, keeping only interactions between adjacent spins, we derive the Master equation and confirm that it is solved by the infinite randomness fixed-point distribution. Then, we derive the master equation for power-law long-range interaction between all spins for any anisotropy $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ ranging from the XX limit, $\ensuremath{\gamma}=0$, to the isotropic Heisenberg limit, $\ensuremath{\gamma}=1,$ which corresponds to a tight-binding chain of disordered long-range interacting fermions with long-range hopping. We thereby show that the distribution function of couplings
J smaller than renormalization scale $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}$ flows to the strong-disorder fixed-point distribution of finite width $2\ensuremath{\alpha}.$ We find only small corrections to that distribution, which depend on power exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ and coupling anisotropy $\ensuremath{\gamma}.$ As a consequence, the low-temperature magnetic susceptibility diverges with an anomalous power law. The distribution of singlet lengths
l is found to decay as ${l}^{\ensuremath{-}2}$. The entanglement entropy of a subsystem of length
n increases in the ground state logarithmically for all $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ and $\ensuremath{\gamma}$. After a global quantum quench, the entanglement entropy increases with time logarithmically as $S(t)\ensuremath{\sim}ln(t)/(2\ensuremath{\alpha})$.
We develop a real-space renormalization-group (RSRG) scheme by appropriately inserting the long-range hopping t∼r^{-α} with nearest-neighbor interaction to study the entanglement entropy and maximum block size for the many-body localization (MBL) transition. We show that for α<2 there exists a localization transition with renormalized disorder that depends logarithmically on the finite size of the system. The transition observed for α>2 does not need a rescaling in disorder strength. Most important, we find that even though the MBL transition for α>2 falls in the same universality class as that of the short-range models, the transition for α<2 belongs to a different universality class. Because of the intrinsic nature of the RSRG flow toward delocalization, MBL phase for α>2 might suffer an instability in the thermodynamic limit while the underlying systems support algebraic localization. Moreover, we verify these findings by inserting microscopic details to the RSRG scheme where we additionally find a more appropriate rescaling function for disorder strength; we indeed uncover a power-law scaling with a logarithmic correction and a distinctly different stretched exponential scaling for α<2 and α>2, respectively, by analyzing system with finite size. This finding further suggests that microscopic RSRG scheme is able to give a hint of instability of the MBL phase for α>2 even considering systems of finite size.
Quantum information theoretical measures are useful tools for characterizing quantum dynamical phases. However, employing them to study excited states of random spin systems is a challenging problem. Here, we report results for the entanglement entropy (EE) scaling of excited eigenstates of random XX antiferromagnetic spin chains with long-range (LR) interactions decaying as a power law with distance with exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. To this end, we extend the real-space renormalization group technique for excited states (RSRG-X) to solve this problem with LR interactions. For comparison, we perform numerical exact diagonalization (ED) calculations. From the distribution of energy-level spacings, as obtained by ED for up to $N\ensuremath{\sim}18$ spins, we find indications of a delocalization transition at ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}\ensuremath{\approx}1$ in the middle of the energy spectrum. With RSRG-X and ED, we show that for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}$ the EE of excited eigenstates retains a logarithmic divergence similar to the one observed for the ground state of the same model, while for $\ensuremath{\alpha}<{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}$ EE displays an algebraic growth with the subsystem size $l, {S}_{l}\ensuremath{\sim}{l}^{\ensuremath{\beta}}$, with $0<\ensuremath{\beta}<1$. We find that ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}\ensuremath{\approx}1$ coincides with the delocalization transition ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}$ in the middle of the many-body spectrum. An interpretation of these results based on the structure of the RG rules is proposed, which is due to rainbow proliferation for very long-range interactions $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\ll}1$. We also investigate the effective temperature dependence of the EE, allowing us to study the half-chain EE of eigenstates at different energy densities, where we find that the crossover in EE occurs at ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}<1$.
We investigate the magnetic susceptibility $\ensuremath{\chi}(T)$ of quantum spin chains of
N=1280 spins with power-law long-range antiferromagnetic couplings as a function of their spatial decay exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ and cutoff length $\ensuremath{\xi}$. The calculations are based on the strong disorder renormalization method which is used to obtain the temperature dependence of $\ensuremath{\chi}(T)$ and distribution functions of couplings at each renormalization step. For the case with only algebraic decay $(\ensuremath{\xi}=\ensuremath{\infty})$ we find a crossover at ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}=1.066$ between a phase with a divergent low-temperature susceptibility $\ensuremath{\chi}(T\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0)$ for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}$ to a phase with a vanishing $\ensuremath{\chi}(T\ensuremath{\rightarrow}0)$ for $\ensuremath{\alpha}<{\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}$. For finite cutoff lengths $\ensuremath{\xi}$, this crossover occurs at a smaller ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}(\ensuremath{\xi})$. Additionally, we study the localization of spin excitations for $\ensuremath{\xi}=\ensuremath{\infty}$ by evaluating the distribution function of excitation energies, and we find a delocalization transition that coincides with the opening of the pseudogap at ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{c}={\ensuremath{\alpha}}^{*}$.