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arXiv:1807.01063 · Physical Review Letters

Local Theory of the Insulating State

Antimo Marrazzo, Raffaele Resta

Published Apr 26, 2019• 32 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

An insulator differs from a metal because of a different organization of the electrons in their ground state. In recent years this feature has been probed by means of a geometrical property, the quantum metric tensor, which addresses the system as a whole, and is therefore limited to macroscopically homogenous samples. Here we show that an analogous approach leads to a localization marker, which can detect the metallic versus insulating character of a given sample region using as the sole ingredient the ground state electron distribution, even in the Anderson case (where the spectrum is gapless). When applied to an insulator with a nonzero Chern invariant, our marker is capable of discriminating the insulating nature of the bulk from the conducting nature of the boundary. Simulations (both model Hamiltonian and first principles) on several test cases validate our theory.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.122.166602

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An insulator differs from a metal because of a different organization of the electrons in their ground state. In recent years this feature has been probed by means of a geometrical property, the quantum metric tensor, which addresses the system as a whole, and is therefore limited to macroscopically homogenous samples. Here we show that an analogous approach leads to a localization marker, which can detect the metallic versus insulating character of a given sample region using as the sole ingredient the ground state electron distribution, even in the Anderson case (where the spectrum is gapless). When applied to an insulator with a nonzero Chern invariant, our marker is capable of discriminating the insulating nature of the bulk from the conducting nature of the boundary. Simulations (both model Hamiltonian and first principles) on several test cases validate our theory.
The insulating state of matter is characterized by the excitation spectrum, but also by qualitative features of the electronic ground state. The insulating ground wavefunction in fact: (i) displays vanishing dc conductivity; (ii) sustains macroscopic polarization; and (iii) is localized. The idea that the insulating state of matter is a consequence of electron localization was first proposed in 1964 by W. Kohn. I discuss here a novel definition of electron localization, rather different from Kohn's, and deeply rooted in the modern theory of polarization. In fact the present approach links the two features (ii) and (iii) above, by means of essentially the same formalism. In the special case of an uncorrelated crystalline solid, the localization of the many-body insulating wavefunction is measured - according to our definition - by the spread of the Wannier orbitals; this spread diverges in the metallic limit. In the correlated case, the novel approach to localization is demonstrated by means of a two-band Hubbard model in one dimension, undergoing a transition from band insulator to Mott insulator.
The insulating state of matter can be probed by means of a ground state geometrical marker, which is closely related to the modern theory of polarization (based on a Berry phase). In the present work we show that this marker can be applied to determine the metal-insulator transition in disordered systems. In particular, for noninteracting systems the geometrical marker can be obtained from the configurational average of the norm-squared one-body density matrix, which can be calculated within open as well as periodic boundary conditions. This is in sharp contrast to a classification based on the static conductivity, which is only sensible within periodic boundary conditions. We exemplify the method by considering a simple lattice model, known to have a metal-insulator transition as a function of the disorder strength, and demonstrate that the transition point can be obtained accurately from the one-body density matrix. The approach has a general ab initio formulation and could in principle be applied to realistic disordered materials by standard electronic structure methods.
Topological states of matter were first introduced for noninteracting fermions on an infinite uniform lattice. Since then, substantial effort has been made to generalize these concepts to more complex settings. Recently, local markers have been developed that can describe the topological state of systems without translational symmetry and a well-defined gap. However, no local marker for interacting matter has been proposed yet that is capable of directly addressing an interacting system. Here, we suggest such a many-body local marker based on the single-particle Green's function. Using this marker we identify topological transitions in finite lattices of a Chern insulator with Anderson disorder and Hubbard interactions. Importantly, our proposal can be generalized to nonequilibrium systems.
Many body localization (MBL) represents a unique physical phenomenon, providing a testing ground for exploring thermalization, or more precisely its failure. Here we characterize the MBL regime geometrically by the many-body quantum metric (MBQM), defined in the parameter space of twist boundary, and the localization parameter as defined in the modern theory of polarization and insulators. First, we demonstrate that the quantum metric can be used to characterize disordered insulating states by applying this theoretical framework to excited states of the 1D Anderson insulator. There we observe that the MBQM and localization parameter are related in finite realizations despite the states being gapless in the thermodynamic limit. Then, we consider a disordered 1D Bose-Hubbard model and find that we can characterize the ergodic-MBL crossover by comparing the MBQM and localization parameter. We find that we can extract a natural localization length in the MBL regime that characterizes the real space spread of the wave function and can be measured by extracting the quantum metric. Our analysis provides complementary insight into the MBL regime focusing on its insulating properties and providing a localization length whose definition is consistent across a range of insulating phases.
Understanding the metal-insulator transition in disordered many-fermion systems, both with and without interactions, is one of the most challenging and consequential problems in condensed matter physics. In this paper, we address this issue from the perspective of the modern theory of the insulating state (MTIS), which has already proven to be effective for band and Mott insulators in clean systems. First, we consider noninteracting systems with different types of aperiodic external potentials: uncorrelated disorder (one-dimensional Anderson model), deterministic disorder (Aubry-Andr\'e Hamiltonian and its modification including next-nearest-neighbor hopping), and disorder with long-range correlations (self-affine potential). We show how the many-body localization tensor defined within the MTIS may be used as a powerful probe to discriminate the insulating and the metallic phases, and to locate the transition point. Then, we investigate the effect of weak repulsive interactions in the Aubry-Andr\'e Hamiltonian, a model which describes a recent cold-atoms experiment. By treating the weak interactions within a mean-field approximation we obtain a linear shift of the transition point towards stronger disorder, providing evidence for delocalization induced by interactions.
We study the disordered topological Anderson insulator in a two-dimensional (square not strip) geometry. We first report the phase diagram of finite systems and then study the evolution of phase boundaries when the system size is increased to a very large $1120\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}1120$ area. We establish that conductance quantization can occur without a bulk band gap, and that there are two distinct scaling regions with quantized conductance: TAI-I with a bulk band gap, and TAI-II with localized bulk states. We show that there is no intervening insulating phase between the bulk conduction phase and the TAI-I and TAI-II scaling regions, and that there is no metallic phase at the transition between the quantized and insulating phases. Centered near the quantized-insulating transition there are very broad peaks in the eigenstate size and fractal dimension d2{d}_{2}d2​; in a large portion of the conductance plateau eigenstates grow when the disorder strength is increased. The fractal dimension at the peak maximum is ${d}_{2}\ensuremath{\approx}1.5$. Effective-medium theory (Coherent Potential Approximation, self-consistent Born approximation) predicts well the boundaries and interior of the gapped TAI-I scaling region, but fails to predict all boundaries save one of the ungapped TAI-II scaling region. We report conductance distributions near several phase transitions and compare them with critical conductance distributions for well-known models.