Recent studies point towards nontriviality of the ergodic phase in systems exhibiting many‐body localization (MBL), which shows subexponential relaxation of local observables, subdiffusive transport and sublinear spreading of the entanglement entropy. Here we review the dynamical properties of this phase and the available numerically exact and approximate methods for its study. We discuss in which sense this phase could be considered ergodic and present possible phenomenological explanations of its dynamical properties. We close by analyzing to which extent the proposed explanations were verified by numerical studies and present the open questions in this field. image
Recent studies point towards nontriviality of the ergodic phase in systems exhibiting many‐body localization (MBL), which shows subexponential relaxation of local observables, subdiffusive transport and sublinear spreading of the entanglement entropy. Here we review the dynamical properties of this phase and the available numerically exact and approximate methods for its study. We discuss in which sense this phase could be considered ergodic and present possible phenomenological explanations of its dynamical properties. We close by analyzing to which extent the proposed explanations were verified by numerical studies and present the open questions in this field. image
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 low‐frequency response of systems near the many‐body localization phase transition, on either side of the transition, is dominated by contributions from rare regions that are locally “in the other phase”, i.e., rare localized regions in a system that is typically thermal, or rare thermal regions in a system that is typically localized. Rare localized regions affect the properties of the thermal phase, especially in one dimension, by acting as bottlenecks for transport and the growth of entanglement, whereas rare thermal regions in the localized phase act as local “baths” and dominate the low‐frequency response of the MBL phase. We review recent progress in understanding these rare‐region effects, and discuss some of the open questions associated with them: in particular, whether and in what circumstances a single rare thermal region can destabilize the many‐body localized phase. image
Ergodicity is a fundamental property of many physical systems which reflects their ability to reach thermal equilibrium during the course of dynamical evolution. In recent years, it has been understood that exceptions to this fundamental behaviour may be possible: as particles become localized by the external disorder, they can fail to form a thermal environment for themselves. Such ‘many-body-localized’ (MBL) systems are perfect insulators, unlike the more familiar band or Mott insulators. That is, the (electrical) conductivity of an MBL system is precisely zero not only in its ground state, but also at finite energy densities, where in ordinary insulators thermally activated transport would dominate. These, along with many other unique properties, have led to an explosion of recent interest in understanding MBL systems, as well as more general, non-ergodic behaviours of quantum many-body systems. What would such systems do, if they do not approach a thermal state? Are there universal aspects to this behaviour, or will every system behave in a different way? On the more applied side, many-body localization might open a new strategy for fighting decoherence. In all current quantum computing attempts, the main difficulty results from the fact that the thermal environment tends to thermalize a qubit, thereby causing decoherence. This has the unwanted consequence of information scrambling: during thermalization, quantum information encoded in the initial state will spread over the entire system and thereby become inaccessible to local measurements. This may not be the case in MBL systems: as a localized environment fails to thermalize, the system can retain some local information about its initial state for indefinite amounts of time, opening up new possibilities for quantum technologies.
Originally proposed by Anderson in 1958 [1], disorder-induced localization was initially mostly studied as a single-particle phenomenon—dubbed Anderson localization. As a paradigmatic quantum phenomenon, Anderson …
We present a review of recent theoretical results concerning the many‐body localization (MBL) phenomenon, with the emphasis on dynamical density correlations and transport quantities. They are shown to be closely related, providing a comprehensive description of the ergodic‐to‐nonergodic transition, consistent with experimental findings. While the focus is set mostly on the one‐dimensional model of interacting spinless fermions, we also present evidence for the absence of full MBL in the one‐dimensional Hubbard model and for the density‐wave decay induced by the inter‐chain coupling. image
We study a random-field Heisenberg model numerically and argue that as we vary the strength of the disorder W there is a phase transition between a thermal phase and a many-body localized phase at a critical disorder strength W C = 3.5 ± 1.0.We show some properties of the many-body localized phase and contrast them to the properties of the thermal phase.We have considered transport properties, scaling of entanglement entropy, level statistics, participation ratios and whether or not the system satisfies the ETH to distinguish between the phases.We also study the dynamics in the thermal phase near the transition and argue that the phase transition is governed by an infinite randomness fixed point.Furthermore we review much of what is known and conjectured about the physics of generic closed quantum systems.