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arXiv:1811.04941 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Algebraic many-body localization and its implications on information propagation

Giuseppe De Tomasi

Published Feb 7, 2019• 50 citations
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Abstract

We probe the existence of a many-body localized phase (MBL phase) in a spinless fermionic Hubbard chain with algebraically localized single-particle states, by investigating both static and dynamical properties of the system. This MBL phase can be characterized by an extensive number of integrals of motion which develop algebraically decaying tails, unlike the case of exponentially localized single-particle states. We focus on the implications for the quantum information propagation through the system. We provide evidence that the bipartite entanglement entropy after a quantum quench has an unbounded algebraic growth in time, while the quantum Fisher information grows logarithmically.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.99.054204

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We probe the existence of a many-body localized phase (MBL phase) in a spinless fermionic Hubbard chain with algebraically localized single-particle states, by investigating both static and dynamical properties of the system. This MBL phase can be characterized by an extensive number of integrals of motion which develop algebraically decaying tails, unlike the case of exponentially localized single-particle states. We focus on the implications for the quantum information propagation through the system. We provide evidence that the bipartite entanglement entropy after a quantum quench has an unbounded algebraic growth in time, while the quantum Fisher information grows logarithmically.
An important and incompletely answered question is whether a closed quantum system of many interacting particles can be localized by disorder. The time evolution of simple (unentangled) initial states is studied numerically for a system of interacting spinless fermions in one dimension described by the random-field XXZ Hamiltonian. Interactions induce a dramatic change in the propagation of entanglement and a smaller change in the propagation of particles. For even weak interactions, when the system is thought to be in a many-body localized phase, entanglement shows neither localized nor diffusive behavior but grows without limit in an infinite system: interactions act as a singular perturbation on the localized state with no interactions. The significance for proposed atomic experiments is that local measurements will show a large but nonthermal entropy in the many-body localized state. This entropy develops slowly (approximately logarithmically) over a diverging time scale as in glassy systems.
We demonstrate that the quantum mutual information (QMI) is a useful probe to study many-body localization (MBL). First, we focus on the detection of a metal-insulator transition for two different models, the noninteracting Aubry-André-Harper model and the spinless fermionic disordered Hubbard chain. We find that the QMI in the localized phase decays exponentially with the distance between the regions traced out, allowing us to define a correlation length, which converges to the localization length in the case of one particle. Second, we show how the QMI can be used as a dynamical indicator to distinguish an Anderson insulator phase from a MBL phase. By studying the spread of the QMI after a global quench from a random product state, we show that the QMI does not spread in the Anderson insulator phase but grows logarithmically in time in the MBL phase.
Interacting quantum many-body systems are expected to thermalize, in the sense that the evolution of local expectation values approaches a stationary value resembling a thermal ensemble. This intuition is notably contradicted in systems exhibiting many-body localisation (MBL). In stark contrast to the non-interacting case of Anderson localisation, the entanglement of states grows without limit over time, albeit slowly. In this work, we establish a novel link between quantum information theory and notions of condensed matter physics, capturing this phenomenon in the Heisenberg picture. We show that the mere existence of local constants of motion, often taken as the defining property of MBL, together with a generic spectrum of the Hamiltonian, is already sufficient to rigorously prove information propagation: these systems can be used to send a classical bit over arbitrary distances, in that the impact of a local perturbation can be detected arbitrarily far away. This counterintuitive result is compatible with and further corroborates the intuition of a slow entanglement growth following global quenches in MBL systems. We perform a detailed perturbation analysis of quasi-local constants of motion and also show that they indeed can be used to construct efficient spectral tensor networks, as recently suggested. Our results provide a detailed and at the same time model-independent picture of information propagation in MBL systems.
Many-body localized (MBL) systems are characterized by the absence of transport and thermalization and, therefore, cannot be described by conventional statistical mechanics. In this paper, using analytic arguments and numerical simulations, we study the behavior of local observables in an isolated MBL system following a quantum quench. For the case of a global quench, we find that the local observables reach stationary, highly nonthermal values at long times as a result of slow dephasing characteristic of the MBL phase. These stationary values retain the local memory of the initial state due to the existence of local integrals of motion in the MBL phase. The temporal fluctuations around stationary values exhibit universal power-law decay in time, with an exponent set by the localization length and the diagonal entropy of the initial state. Such a power-law decay holds for any local observable and is related to the logarithmic in time growth of entanglement in the MBL phase. This behavior distinguishes the MBL phase from both the Anderson insulator (where no stationary state is reached) and from the ergodic phase (where relaxation is expected to be exponential). For the case of a local quench, we also find a power-law approach of local observables to their stationary values when the system is prepared in a mixed state. Quench protocols considered in this paper can be naturally implemented in systems of ultracold atoms in disordered optical lattices, and the behavior of local observables provides a direct experimental signature of many-body localization.
We consider spinless fermions on a finite one-dimensional lattice, interacting via nearest-neighbor repulsion and subject to a strong electric field. In the noninteracting case, due to Wannier-Stark localization, the single-particle wave functions are exponentially localized even though the model has no quenched disorder. We show that this system remains localized in the presence of interactions and exhibits physics analogous to models of conventional many-body localization (MBL). In particular, the entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with time after a quench, albeit with a slightly different functional form from the MBL case, and the level statistics of the many-body energy spectrum are Poissonian. We moreover predict that a quench experiment starting from a charge-density wave state would show results similar to those of Schreiber et al. [Science 349, 842 (2015)SCIEAS0036-807510.1126/science.aaa7432].
An interacting quantum system that is subject to disorder may cease to thermalize owing to localization of its constituents, thereby marking the breakdown of thermodynamics. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the system's entanglement, which is experimentally challenging to measure. We realize such a many-body-localized system in a disordered Bose-Hubbard chain and characterize its entanglement properties through particle fluctuations and correlations. We observe that the particles become localized, suppressing transport and preventing the thermalization of subsystems. Notably, we measure the development of nonlocal correlations, whose evolution is consistent with a logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy, the hallmark of many-body localization. Our work experimentally establishes many-body localization as a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from localization in noninteracting, disordered systems.