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arXiv:1511.03676 · Physical Review Letters

Variable-Range Hopping through Marginally Localized Phonons

Sumilan Banerjee, Ehud Altman

Published Mar 17, 2016• 31 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate the effect of coupling Anderson localized particles in one dimension to a system of marginally localized phonons having a symmetry protected delocalized mode at zero frequency. This situation is naturally realized for electrons coupled to phonons in a disordered nanowire as well as for ultracold fermions coupled to phonons of a superfluid in a one-dimensional disordered trap. To determine if the coupled system can be many-body localized we analyze the phonon-mediated hopping transport for both the weak and strong coupling regimes. We show that the usual variable-range hopping mechanism involving a low-order phonon process is ineffective at low temperature due to discreteness of the bath at the required energy. Instead, the system thermalizes through a many-body process involving exchange of a diverging number n∝-logT of phonons in the low temperature limit. This effect leads to a highly singular prefactor to Mott's well-known formula and strongly suppresses the variable range hopping rate. Finally, we comment on possible implications of this physics in higher dimensional electron-phonon coupled systems.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.116.116601

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We investigate the effect of coupling Anderson localized particles in one dimension to a system of marginally localized phonons having a symmetry protected delocalized mode at zero frequency. This situation is naturally realized for electrons coupled to phonons in a disordered nanowire as well as for ultracold fermions coupled to phonons of a superfluid in a one-dimensional disordered trap. To determine if the coupled system can be many-body localized we analyze the phonon-mediated hopping transport for both the weak and strong coupling regimes. We show that the usual variable-range hopping mechanism involving a low-order phonon process is ineffective at low temperature due to discreteness of the bath at the required energy. Instead, the system thermalizes through a many-body process involving exchange of a diverging number n∝-logT of phonons in the low temperature limit. This effect leads to a highly singular prefactor to Mott's well-known formula and strongly suppresses the variable range hopping rate. Finally, we comment on possible implications of this physics in higher dimensional electron-phonon coupled systems.
The combined effects of disorder and long-range hopping play an important role in determining localization and transport in low-dimensional quantum systems. We study transport in a one-dimensional disordered chain with nearest-neighbor hopping supplemented by a long-range hopping term. The long-range coupling is characterized by site-dependent amplitudes that may be either uniform or random. We investigate the interplay between diagonal disorder and long-range hopping, characterizing the resulting transport efficiency. We find that nearest-neighbor hopping in the presence of uniform long-range hopping amplitudes strongly suppresses delocalization over a range of weak disorder. The disorder-enhanced transport regime, established in previous studies, can be understood here as the recovery of delocalization from this strongly suppressed regime. An analytical solution in the Anderson eigenstate basis reveals the microscopic origin of this behavior. In particular, we show that the low-disorder regime of strongly suppressed delocalization can be eliminated by introducing randomness into the long-range hopping amplitudes, providing an additional mechanism for enhancing transport and qualitatively changing the response of the system to disorder.
Motivated by the recent experiments that reported signatures of many-body localization of ultracold atoms in optical lattices [M. Schreiber et al., Science 349, 842 (2015)], we study dynamics of highly excited states in the strongly disordered Hubbard model in one dimension. Owing to the SU(2)SU(2)SU(2) spin symmetry, spin degrees of freedom form a delocalized thermal bath with a narrow bandwidth. The spin bath mediates slow particle transport, eventually leading to delocalization of particles. The particle hopping rate is exponentially small in t/W(t,Wt/W\phantom{\rule{4pt}{0ex}}(t,Wt/W(t,W being hopping and disorder scales) owing to the narrow bandwidth of the spin bath. We find the optimal length scale for particle hopping and show that the particle transport rate depends strongly on the density of singly occupied sites in the initial state. The delocalization rate is zero for initial states with only doubly occupied or empty sites, suggesting that such states are truly many-body localized, and therefore the Hubbard model may host both localized and delocalized states. Full many-body localization can be induced by breaking spin rotational symmetry.
We study electronic transport in Anderson insulators with strong Coulomb interactions in dimensions d>=2. Close to the metal insulator transition where the single particle localization length is much larger than interparticle-distance, the interactions lead to a strongly correlated quantum glass phase. Even though single particle excitations are localized and the system is insulating, there are collective electronic modes which remain delocalized down to parametrically small energies. These collective excitations serve as a continuous bath which can provide the activation energy for variable range hopping transport. This circumvents the energy conservation problem arising when only discrete particle-hole excitations are present. In contrast to the weak and material-dependent phonon-assisted hopping mechanism, the activation by an electronic bath leads to a nearly universal prefactor e^2/h of the Efros-Shklovskii conductance, as is observed in many recent experiments.
The possibility of using nanoelectromechanical systems as a simulation tool for quantum many-body effects is explored. It is demonstrated that an array of electrostatically coupled nanoresonators can effectively simulate the Bose-Hubbard model without interactions, corresponding in the single-phonon regime to the Anderson tight-binding model. Employing a density matrix formalism for the system coupled to a bosonic thermal bath, we study the interplay between disorder and thermalization, focusing on the delocalization process. It is found that the phonon population remains localized for a long time at low enough temperatures; with increasing temperatures the localization is rapidly lost due to thermal pumping of excitations into the array, producing in the equilibrium a fully thermalized system. Finally, we consider a possible experimental design to measure the phonon population in the array by means of a superconducting transmon qubit coupled to individual nanoresonators. We also consider the possibility of using the proposed quantum simulator for realizing continuous-time quantum walks.
Anderson localization1 in a random system is sensitive to a distance dependence of the excitation transfer amplitude V(r). If V(r) decreases with the distance r slower than 1/r^d in a d-dimensional system then all excitations are delocalized at arbitrarily strong disordering, due to the resonant interaction of far separated quantum states (Fig. 1). At finite temperature T>0 the density of excitations is finite and they can influence each other by means of their interaction. Many body excitations involving simultaneous transitions of several single particle excitations create additional channels for energy delocalization and transport. Here we show that if the interaction of excitations decreases with the distance slower than 1/R^(2d) then excitations are delocalized at finite temperature irrespectively to disordering. This delocalization results in the finite decoherence rate in the ensemble of interacting spins 1/2 representing the model of quantum computer, thus restricting the quantum hardware performance. It also leads to the energy and particle delocalization and transport at finite temperature in various physical systems including doped semiconductors, despite of the full localization of electrons at zero temperature.
Closed generic quantum many-body systems may fail to thermalize under certain conditions even after long times, a phenomenon called many-body localization (MBL). Numerous studies support the stability of the MBL phase in strongly disordered one-dimensional systems. However, the situation is much less clear when a small part of the system is ergodic, a scenario which also has important implications for the existence of many-body localization in higher dimensions. Here we address this question experimentally using a large-scale quantum simulator of ultracold bosons in a two-dimensional optical lattice. We prepare two-component mixtures of varying relative population and implement a disorder potential which is only experienced by one of the components. The second non-disordered ''clean'' component plays the role of a bath of adjustable size that is collisionally coupled to the ''dirty'' component. Our experiments show how the dynamics of the dirty component, which, when on its own, show strong evidence of localization, become affected by the coupling to the clean component. For a high clean population, the clean component appears to behave as an effective bath for the system which leads to its delocalization, while for a smaller clean population, the ability of the bath to destabilize the system becomes strongly reduced. Our results reveal how a finite-sized quantum system can bring another one towards thermalization, in a regime of complex interplay between disorder, tunneling and intercomponent interactions. They provide a new benchmark for effective theories aiming to capture the complex physics of MBL in the weakly localized regime.