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arXiv:2012.15676 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Thouless energy across the many-body localization transition in Floquet systems

Michael Sonner, Maksym Serbyn, Zlatko Papić, Dmitry A. Abanin

Published Aug 26, 2021• 0 citations
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Abstract

The notion of Thouless energy plays a central role in the theory of Anderson localization. We investigate and compare the scaling of Thouless energy across the many-body localization (MBL) transition in a Floquet model. We use a combination of methods that are reliable on the ergodic side of the transition (e.g., spectral form factor) and methods that work on the MBL side (e.g., typical matrix elements of local operators) to obtain a complete picture of the Thouless energy behavior across the transition. On the ergodic side, Thouless energy decreases slowly with the system size, while at the transition it becomes comparable to the level spacing. Different probes yield consistent estimates of Thouless energy in their overlapping regime of applicability, giving the location of the transition point nearly free of finite-size drift. This work establishes a connection between different definitions of Thouless energy in a many-body setting and yields insights into the MBL transition in Floquet systems.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.104.l081112

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The notion of Thouless energy plays a central role in the theory of Anderson localization. We investigate and compare the scaling of Thouless energy across the many-body localization (MBL) transition in a Floquet model. We use a combination of methods that are reliable on the ergodic side of the transition (e.g., spectral form factor) and methods that work on the MBL side (e.g., typical matrix elements of local operators) to obtain a complete picture of the Thouless energy behavior across the transition. On the ergodic side, Thouless energy decreases slowly with the system size, while at the transition it becomes comparable to the level spacing. Different probes yield consistent estimates of Thouless energy in their overlapping regime of applicability, giving the location of the transition point nearly free of finite-size drift. This work establishes a connection between different definitions of Thouless energy in a many-body setting and yields insights into the MBL transition in Floquet systems.
Thermal and many-body localized phases are separated by a dynamical phase transition of a new kind. We analyze the distribution of off-diagonal matrix elements of local operators across this transition in two different models of disordered spin chains. We show that the behavior of matrix elements can be used to characterize the breakdown of thermalization and to extract the many-body Thouless energy. We find that upon increasing the disorder strength the system enters a critical region around the many-body localization transition. The properties of the system in this region are: (i) the Thouless energy becomes smaller than the level spacing, (ii) the matrix elements show critical dependence on the energy difference, and (iii) the matrix elements, viewed as amplitudes of a fictitious wave function, exhibit strong multifractality. This critical region decreases with the system size, which we interpret as evidence for a diverging correlation length at the many-body localization transition. Our findings show that the correlation length becomes larger than the accessible system sizes in a broad range of disorder strength values and shed light on the critical behavior near the many-body localization transition.
Within the Thouless energy scale, many-body Hamiltonians behave like random matrices. We study the Thouless energy of the disordered Heisenberg quantum spin chain. This model has become the standard model for the study of many-body localization and the transition to an ergodic phase for weak disorder. We focus on the ergodic side of the Many-Body Localization transition. The Thouless energy extracted from long range spectral statistics and from the power spectrum of the fluctuations of the full momentum distribution coincide. This scale behaves non-monotonically and is peaked at an intermediate value of the disorder. An analysis of the scaling behavior of the Thouless energy and its comparison with the number of populated eigenstates after a quench suggests that this scale is not large enough to guarantee thermalization in the thermodynamic limit.
For short-ranged disordered quantum models in one dimension, the Many-Body-Localization is analyzed via the adaptation to the Many-Body context [M. Serbyn, Z. Papic and D.A. Abanin, PRX 5, 041047 (2015)] of the Thouless point of view on the Anderson transition : the question is whether a local interaction between two long chains is able to reshuffle completely the eigenstates (Delocalized phase with a volume-law entanglement) or whether the hybridization between tensor states remains limited (Many-Body-Localized Phase with an area-law entanglement). The central object is thus the level of Hybridization induced by the matrix elements of local operators, as compared with the difference of diagonal energies. The multifractal analysis of these matrix elements of local operators is used to analyze the corresponding statistics of resonances. Our main conclusion is that the critical point is characterized by the Strong-Multifractality Spectrum f(0≤α≤2)=α2f(0 \leq \alpha \leq 2)=\frac{\alpha}{2}f(0≤α≤2)=2α​, well known in the context of Anderson Localization in spaces of effective infinite dimensionality, where the size of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the volume. As a consequence, the level statistics at criticality is the closest possible to the Poisson statistics of the Localized phase, and the Delocalized phase near the critical point is not ergodic.
Characterizing the nature of many-body localization transitions (MBLTs) and their potential critical behaviors has remained a challenging problem. In this work, we study the dynamics of the displacement, quantifying the spread of the radial probability distribution in the Fock space, for three systems with MBLTs, i.e., the Hamiltonian models with quasiperiodic and random fields, as well as a random-circuit Floquet model of a MBLT. We then perform a finite-size scaling analysis of the long-time averaged displacement by considering two types of ansatz for MBLTs, i.e., continuous and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transitions. The data collapse based on the assumption of a continuous phase transition with power-law correlation length reveals that the scaling exponent of the MBLT induced by random field is close to that of the Floquet model, but significantly differs from the quasiperiodic model. Additionally, we find that the BKT-type scaling provides a more accurate description of the MBLTs in the random model and the Floquet model, yielding larger (finite-size) critical points compared to those obtained from power-law scaling. Our work highlights that the displacement is a valuable tool for studying MBLTs, and is relevant to ongoing experimental efforts.
We analyze the finite-size scaling of the average gap ratio and the entanglement entropy across the many-body localization (MBL) transition in one dimensional Heisenberg spin chain with quasiperiodic (QP) potential. By using the recently introduced cost-function approach, we compare different scenarios for the transition using exact diagonalization of systems up to 22 lattice sites. Our findings suggest that the MBL transition in the QP Heisenberg chain belongs to the class of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition, the same as in the case of uniformly disordered systems as advocated in recent studies. Moreover, we observe that the critical disorder strength shows a clear sublinear drift with the system size as compared to the linear drift seen in random disordered models, suggesting that the finite-size effects in the MBL transition for the QP systems are less severe than that in the random disordered scenario. Moreover, deep in the ergodic regime, we find an unexpected double-peak structure of distribution of on-site magnetizations that can be traced back to the strong correlations present in the QP potential.
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.