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arXiv:1905.03128 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Diffusive transport in a quasiperiodic Fibonacci chain: Absence of many-body localization at weak interactions

Vipin Kerala Varma, Marko Žnidarič

Published Aug 1, 2019• 38 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study high-temperature magnetization transport in a many-body spin-1/2 chain with on-site quasiperiodic potential governed by the Fibonacci rule. In the absence of interactions it is known that the system is critical with the transport described by a continuously varying dynamical exponent (from ballistic to localized) as a function of the on-site potential strength. Upon introducing weak interactions, we find that an anomalous noninteracting dynamical exponent becomes diffusive for any potential strength. This is borne out by a boundary-driven Lindblad dynamics as well as unitary dynamics, with agreeing diffusion constants. This must be contrasted to a random potential where transport is subdiffusive at such small interactions. Mean-field treatment of the dynamics for small $U$ always slows down the noninteracting dynamics to subdiffusion, and is therefore unable to describe diffusion in an interacting quasiperiodic system. Finally, briefly exploring larger interactions we find a regime of interaction-induced subdiffusive dynamics, despite the on-site potential itself having no ``rare regions.''

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.100.085105

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We study high-temperature magnetization transport in a many-body spin-1/2 chain with on-site quasiperiodic potential governed by the Fibonacci rule. In the absence of interactions it is known that the system is critical with the transport described by a continuously varying dynamical exponent (from ballistic to localized) as a function of the on-site potential strength. Upon introducing weak interactions, we find that an anomalous noninteracting dynamical exponent becomes diffusive for any potential strength. This is borne out by a boundary-driven Lindblad dynamics as well as unitary dynamics, with agreeing diffusion constants. This must be contrasted to a random potential where transport is subdiffusive at such small interactions. Mean-field treatment of the dynamics for small UUU always slows down the noninteracting dynamics to subdiffusion, and is therefore unable to describe diffusion in an interacting quasiperiodic system. Finally, briefly exploring larger interactions we find a regime of interaction-induced subdiffusive dynamics, despite the on-site potential itself having no ``rare regions.''
We study dephasing enhanced transport in boundary-driven quasiperiodic systems. Specifically, we consider dephasing modeled by current-preserving Lindblad dissipators acting on the noninteracting Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper and Fibonacci bulk systems. The former is known to undergo a critical localization transition with a suppression of ballistic transport above a critical value of the potential. At the critical point, the presence of nonergodic extended states yields anomalous subdiffusion. The Fibonacci model, on the other hand, yields anomalous transport with a continuously varying exponent depending on the potential strength. By computing the covariance matrix in the nonequilibrium steady state, we show that sufficiently strong dephasing always renders the transport diffusive. The interplay between dephasing and quasiperiodicity gives rise to a maximum of the diffusion coefficient for finite dephasing, which suggests that the combination of quasiperiodic geometries and dephasing can be used to control noise enhanced transport.
Quantum dynamics on quasiperiodic geometries has recently gathered significant attention in ultracold atom experiments where nontrivial localized phases have been observed. One such quasiperiodic model is the so-called Fibonacci model. In this tight-binding model, noninteracting particles are subject to on-site energies generated by a Fibonacci sequence. This is known to induce critical states, with a continuously varying dynamical exponent, leading to anomalous transport. In this work, we investigate whether anomalous diffusion present in the noninteracting system survives in the presence of interactions and establish connections to a possible transition towards a localized phase. We investigate the dynamics of the interacting Fibonacci model by studying real-time spread of density-density correlations at infinite temperature using the dynamical typicality approach. We also corroborate our findings by calculating the participation entropy in configuration space and investigating the expectation value of local observables in the diagonal ensemble.
Using a combination of numerically exact and renormalization-group techniques we study the nonequilibrium transport of electrons in a one-dimensional interacting system subject to a quasiperiodic potential. For this purpose we calculate the growth of the mean-square displacement as well as the melting of domain walls. While the system is nonintegrable for all studied parameters, there is no finite region of parameters for which we observe diffusive transport. In particular, our model shows a rich dynamical behavior crossing over from superdiffusion to subdiffusion. We discuss the implications of our results for the general problem of many-body localization, with a particular emphasis on the rare region Griffiths picture of subdiffusion.
We study transport in the boundary-driven XX spin chain with onsite disorder and randomly positioned onsite dephasing, observing a transition from diffusive to subdiffusive spin transport below a critical density of sites with dephasing. We then present an exactly solvable semiclassical model of conductors and insulators, which exhibits both diffusive and subdiffusive phases, and qualitatively reproduces the results of the quantum system. The subdiffusion in these models is a consequence of rare insulating regions, and they therefore exhibit, in a more controlled setup, the physics of which have been conjectured to cause the subdiffusive transport observed in interacting many-body localizable systems. For the quantum model we show that finite-size effects come from the interplay of three characteristic lengths: one associated with disorder (the localization length), one with dephasing, and the third with the percolation problem defining large, rare, insulating regions. The latter grows logarithmically with system size, and we conjecture that this may be the reason why the heavy-tailed distributions typical of Griffiths effects have not been observed in subdiffusive interacting systems.
We theoretically study transport properties in one-dimensional interacting quasiperiodic systems at infinite temperature. We compare and contrast the dynamical transport properties across the many-body localization (MBL) transition in quasiperiodic and random models. Using exact diagonalization we compute the optical conductivity $\ensuremath{\sigma}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ and the return probability $R(\ensuremath{\tau})$ and study their average low-frequency and long-time power-law behavior, respectively. We show that the low-energy transport dynamics is markedly distinct in both the thermal and MBL phases in quasiperiodic and random models and find that the diffusive and MBL regimes of the quasiperiodic model are more robust than those in the random system. Using the distribution of the dc conductivity, we quantify the contribution of sample-to-sample and state-to-state fluctuations of $\ensuremath{\sigma}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ across the MBL transition. We find that the activated dynamical scaling ansatz works poorly in the quasiperiodic model but holds in the random model with an estimated activation exponent $\ensuremath{\psi}\ensuremath{\approx}0.9$. We argue that near the MBL transition in quasiperiodic systems, critical eigenstates give rise to a subdiffusive crossover regime on finite-size systems.
While the high-temperature spin diffusion in spin chains with random local fields has been the subject of numerous studies concerning the phenomenon of many-body localization (MBL), the energy diffusion in the same models has been much less explored. We demonstrate that energy diffusion is faster at weak random fields but becomes essentially equal at strong fields; hence, both diffusions determine the slowest relaxation time scale (Thouless time) in the system. Numerically reachable finite-size systems reveal the anomalously large distribution of diffusion constants with respect to actual field configurations. Despite the exponential-like dependence of diffusion on field strength, the results for sensitivity to twisted boundary conditions are incompatible with the Thouless criterion for localization and the presumed transition to MBL, at least for numerically reachable sizes. In contrast, we find indications of the scenario of subdiffusive transport, particularly in the dynamical diffusivity response.