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arXiv:2001.03167 · Physical Review Research

Local integrals of motion for topologically ordered many-body localized systems

Thorsten B. Wahl, Benjamin Béri

Published Jul 17, 2020• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Many-body localized (MBL) systems are often described using their local integrals of motion, which, for spin systems, are commonly assumed to be a local unitary transform of the set of on-site spin-z operators.We show that this assumption cannot hold for topologically ordered MBL systems.Using a suitable definition to capture such systems in any spatial dimension, we demonstrate a number of features, including that MBL topological order, if present, (i) is the same for all eigenstates, (ii) is robust in character against any perturbation preserving MBL, and (iii) implies that on topologically nontrivial manifolds a complete set of integrals of motion must include nonlocal ones in the form of local-unitary-dressed noncontractible Wilson loops.Our approach is well suited for tensor-network methods and is expected to allow these to resolve highly excited finite-size-split topological eigenspaces despite their overlap in energy.We illustrate our approach on the disordered Kitaev chain, toric code, and X-cube model.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.2.033099

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Many-body localized (MBL) systems are often described using their local integrals of motion, which, for spin systems, are commonly assumed to be a local unitary transform of the set of on-site spin-z operators.We show that this assumption cannot hold for topologically ordered MBL systems.Using a suitable definition to capture such systems in any spatial dimension, we demonstrate a number of features, including that MBL topological order, if present, (i) is the same for all eigenstates, (ii) is robust in character against any perturbation preserving MBL, and (iii) implies that on topologically nontrivial manifolds a complete set of integrals of motion must include nonlocal ones in the form of local-unitary-dressed noncontractible Wilson loops.Our approach is well suited for tensor-network methods and is expected to allow these to resolve highly excited finite-size-split topological eigenspaces despite their overlap in energy.We illustrate our approach on the disordered Kitaev chain, toric code, and X-cube model.
Many-body localization (MBL) has been proposed to enable and protect topological order in all eigenstates, vastly expanding the traditional ground-state setting. However, for the most intriguing case of two-dimensional (2D) systems with anyons and topology-dependent degeneracies, the dense many-body spectrum challenges studying this MBL protection numerically. Here we use large-scale full-spectrum variational to demonstrate MBL-protected topological order in the disordered 2D toric code perturbed by magnetic fields. We show that the system has topological local integrals of motion (tLIOMs) for magnetic field strengths below h c ≈ 0.1 times the toric-code coupling scale. Combining tLIOMs with exact diagonalization, we also identify high-energy topological multiplets in the dense many-body spectrum. The phase diagram we find is consistent with toric-code and trivial MBL phases being separated by an intervening thermal phase. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Many-body-localized (MBL) phases can be topologically distinct, but distinguishing these phases using order parameters can be challenging. Here we show how topologically distinct local integrals of motion, variationally parametrized by quantum circuits, can be used to numerically demonstrate the topological inequivalence of MBL phases. We illustrate our approach on a fermionic chain where both topologically distinct MBL phases and benchmark comparisons to order parameters are possible. We also use our approach, augmented by the excited state density-matrix renormalization group algorithm, to extract high-energy topological doublets. We describe applying our methods to higher dimensions to identify MBL topological order and topological multiplets hidden by the dense many-body spectrum.
We construct a complete set of local integrals of motion that characterize the many-body localized (MBL) phase. Our approach relies on the assumption that local perturbations act locally on the eigenstates in the MBL phase, which is supported by numerical simulations of the random-field XXZ spin chain. We describe the structure of the eigenstates in the MBL phase and discuss the implications of local conservation laws for its nonequilibrium quantum dynamics. We argue that the many-body localization can be used to protect coherence in the system by suppressing relaxation between eigenstates with different local integrals of motion.
Abstract The emergent integrability in a many-body localized (MBL) system can be well characterized by the existence of the complete set of local integrals of motion (LIOMs). Such exactly conserved and exponentially localized operators are often understood as quasiparticle operators which can be expanded in terms of single-particle operators dressed with different numbers of particle-hole pairs. Here, we consider a one-dimensional XXZ spin- <?CDATA 12\frac{1}{2}21​?> 1 2 Heisenberg chain in the presence of a random field and try to quantify the corrections needed to be considered in the picture of quasiparticles associated with LIOMs due to the presence of particle-hole excitations. To this end, we explicitly present the multibody expansion of LIOM creation operators of the system in the MBL regime. We analytically obtain the coefficients of this expansion and discuss the effect of higher-order corrections associated with different numbers of particle-hole excitations. Our analysis shows that depending on the localization length of the system, there exist a regime in which the contributions that come from higher-order terms can break down the effective one-particle description of the LIOMs and such quasiparticles become essentially many-body-like.
Many-body localization (MBL) lends remarkable robustness to nonequilibrium phases of matter. Such phases can show topological and symmetry-breaking order in their ground and excited states, but they may also belong to an anomalous localized topological phase (ALT phase). All eigenstates in an ALT phase are trivial, in that they can be deformed to product states, but the entire Hamiltonian cannot be deformed to a trivial localized model without going through a delocalization transition. Using a correspondence between MBL phases with short-ranged entanglement and locality-preserving unitaries, called quantum cellular automata (QCA), we reduce the classification of ALT phases to that of QCA. This method extends to periodically (Floquet) and quasiperiodically driven ALT phases, and captures anomalous Floquet phases within the same framework as static phases. We considerably develop the study of the topology of QCA, allowing us to classify static and driven ALT phases in low dimensions. The QCA framework further generalizes to include symmetry-enriched ALT phases (SALT phases), which we also classify in low dimensions, and provides a large class of soluble models suitable for realization in quantum simulators. In systematizing the study of ALT phases, we both greatly extend the classification of interacting nonequilibrium systems and clarify a confusion in the literature which implicitly equates nontrivial Hamiltonians with nontrivial ground states.
Many-body localization provides a generic mechanism of ergodicity breaking in quantum systems. In contrast to conventional ergodic systems, many-body-localized (MBL) systems are characterized by extensively many local integrals of motion (LIOM), which underlie the absence of transport and thermalization in these systems. Here we report a physically motivated construction of local integrals of motion in the MBL phase. We show that any local operator (e.g., a local particle number or a spin-flip operator), evolved with the system's Hamiltonian and averaged over time, becomes a LIOM in the MBL phase. Such operators have a clear physical meaning, describing the response of the MBL system to a local perturbation. In particular, when a local operator represents a density of some globally conserved quantity, the corresponding LIOM describes how this conserved quantity propagates through the MBL phase. Being uniquely defined and experimentally measurable, these LIOMs provide a natural tool for characterizing the properties of the MBL phase, in both experiments and numerical simulations. We demonstrate the latter by numerically constructing an extensive set of LIOMs in the MBL phase of a disordered spin-chain model. We show that the resulting LIOMs are quasilocal and use their decay to extract the localization length and establish the location of the transition between the MBL and ergodic phases.