We show that a one-dimensional ordered fermionic lattice system with power-law-decaying hopping, when connected to two baths at its two ends with different chemical potentials at zero temperature, features two phases showing subdiffusive scaling of conductance with system size. These phases have no analogues in the isolated system (i.e., in absence of the baths) where the transport is perfectly ballistic. In the open system scenario, interestingly, there occurs two chemical-potential-driven subdiffusive to ballistic phase transitions at zero temperature. We discuss how these phase transitions, to our knowledge, are different from all the known nonequilibrium quantum phase transitions. We provide a clear understanding of the microscopic origin of these phases and argue that the subdiffusive phases are robust against the presence of arbitrary number-conserving many-body interactions in the system. These phases showing subdiffusive scaling of conductance with system size in a two-terminal setup are therefore universal properties of all ordered one-dimensional number-conserving fermionic systems with power-law-decaying hopping at zero temperature.
We study nonequilibrium steady-state transport in a boundary driven one-dimensional fermionic lattice setup which is further subjected to particle loss. We analyze the system size scaling of conductance at zero temperature for different values of the chemical potential of the boundary reservoirs. We consider a variety of loss channel configurations: (i) single loss at the middle site of the lattice, (ii) multiple but nonextensive lossy channels, and (iii) extensive lossy channels. For the cases (i) and (ii), the conductance scaling with system size remains robust (i.e., same as the case with no loss) for chemical potential within and outside the lattice band, while at the band edge rich anomalous conductance scaling emerges. For case (iii), the conductance scaling becomes ballistic in the thermodynamic limit for any value of chemical potential. We explain the emergence of these different system size scalings of conductance by analyzing the spectral properties of the associated non-Hermitian transfer matrices of the underlying lattice. We demonstrate that the emergence of anomalous scaling is deeply connected to the existence of exceptional points of transfer matrices. Our study unravels that by carefully optimizing the loss mechanism configurations, one can in principle realize systems with rich transport properties in low-dimensional open quantum systems.
We reveal interesting universal transport behavior of ordered one-dimensional fermionic systems with power-law hopping. We restrict ourselves to the case where the power-law decay exponent [Formula: see text], so that the thermodynamic limit is well-defined. We explore the quantum phase-diagram of the non-interacting model in terms of the zero temperature Drude weight, which can be analytically calculated. Most interestingly, we reveal that for [Formula: see text], there is a phase where the zero temperature Drude weight diverges as filling fraction goes to zero. Thus, in this regime, counter intuitively, reducing number of particles increases transport and is maximum for a sub-extensive number of particles. Being a statement about zero-filling, this transport behavior is immune to adding number conserving interaction terms. We have explicitly checked this using two different interacting systems. We propose that measurement of persistent current due to a flux through a mesoscopic ring with power-law hopping will give an experimental signature of this phase. In persistent current, the signature of this phase survives up to a finite temperature for a finite system. At higher temperatures, a crossover is seen. The maximum persistent current shows a power-law decay at high temperatures. This is in contrast with short ranged systems, where the persistent current decays exponentially with temperature.
The conductance at the band edges of one-dimensional fermionic wires, with
N sites, has been shown to have subdiffusive
(1/N2) behavior. We investigate this issue in two-dimensional fermionic wires described by a hopping model on an ${N}_{x}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{N}_{y}$ rectangular lattice comprised of vertical chains with a Hermitian intrachain and interchain hopping matrices given by
H0 and
H1, respectively. We study particle transport using the nonequilibrium Green's function formalism, and we show that the asymptotic behavior of the conductance, $T(\ensuremath{\omega})$, at the Fermi level $\ensuremath{\omega}$, is controlled by the spectrum of a dimensionless matrix $A(\ensuremath{\omega})=(\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\omega}+{H}_{0}){H}_{1}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$. This gives three simple conditions on the spectrum of $A(\ensuremath{\omega})$ for observing ballistic, subdiffusive, and exponentially decaying $T(\ensuremath{\omega})$ with respect to
Nx. We show that certain eigenvalues of $A(\ensuremath{\omega})$ give rise to subdiffusive contributions in the conductance, and correspond to the band edges of the isolated wire. We demonstrate that the condition for observing the subdiffusive behavior can be satisfied if $A(\ensuremath{\omega})$ has nontrivial topology. In that case, a transition from ballistic behavior to subdiffusive behavior of the conductance is observed as the hopping parameters are tuned within the topological regime. We argue that at the transition point, different behaviors of the conductance can arise as the trivial bulk bands of $A(\ensuremath{\omega})$ also contribute subdiffusively. We illustrate our findings in a simple model by numerically computing the variation of the conductance with
Nx. Our numerical results indicate a different subdiffusive behavior (
1/Nx3) of the conductance at the transition point. We find the numerical results to be in good agreement with the theoretical predictions.
We consider a one-dimensional fermionic lattice system with long-ranged power-law decaying hopping with exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. The system is further subjected to dephasing noise in the bulk. We investigate two variants of the problem: (i) an open quantum system where the setup is further subjected to boundary reservoirs enabling the scenario of a nonequilibrium steady-state charge transport, and (ii) time dynamics of an initially localized single-particle excitation in the absence of boundary reservoirs. In both variants, anomalous superdiffusive behavior is observed for $1<\ensuremath{\alpha}<1.5$, and for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>1.5$ the setup is effectively short ranged and exhibits conventional diffusive transport. Our findings are supported by analytical calculations based on the multiple scale analysis technique that leads to the emergence of a fractional diffusion equation for the density profile. Our study unravels an interesting interplay between long-range interaction and dephasing mechanism that could result in the emergence of unconventional behavior in open quantum systems.
Recently, it has been shown that, in one-dimensional fermionic systems, close to band edges, the zero temperature conductance scales as
1/N2, where
N is the system length. This universal subdiffusive scaling of conductance at band edges has been tied to an exceptional point (EP) of the transfer matrix of the system that occurs at every band edge. Further, in the presence of bulk dephasing probes, this EP has been shown to lead to a counterintuitive superballistic scaling of conductance, where the conductance increases with
N over a finite but large regime of system lengths. In this work, we explore how these behaviors are affected by the order of the transfer matrix EP at the band edge. We consider a one-dimensional fermionic lattice chain with a finite range of hopping. Depending on the range of hopping and the hopping parameters, this system can feature band edges which correspond to arbitrarily higher order EPs of the associated transfer matrix. Using this system we establish in generality that, in the absence of bulk dephasing, surprisingly, the universal
1/N2 scaling of conductance is completely unaffected by the order of the EP. This is despite the fact that existence of transfer matrix EP is crucial for such behavior. In the presence of bulk dephasing, however, the phase coherence length, the extent of the superballisitic scaling regime, and the exponent of superballistic scaling all encode the order of the transfer matrix EP.
We study many-body localization (MBL) in a one-dimensional system of spinless fermions with a deterministic aperiodic potential in the presence of random interactions
Vij decaying as power-law ${V}_{ij}/{({r}_{ij})}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ with distance
rij. We demonstrate that MBL survives even for $\ensuremath{\alpha}<1$ and is preceded by a broad nonergodic subdiffusive phase. Starting from parameters at which the short-range interacting system shows an infinite temperature MBL phase, turning on random power-law interactions results in many-body mobility edges in the spectrum with a larger fraction of ergodic delocalized states for smaller values of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$. Hence, the critical disorder
hcr, at which ergodic to nonergodic transition takes place, increases with the range of interactions. Time evolution of the density imbalance
I(t), which has power-law decay $I(t)\ensuremath{\sim}{t}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\gamma}}$ in the intermediate to large time regime, shows that the critical disorder
hcI, above which the system becomes diffusionless (with $\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\sim}0$) and transits into the MBL phase, is much larger than
hcr. In between
hcr and
hcI there is a broad nonergodic subdiffusive phase, which is characterized by the Poissonian statistics for the level spacing ratio, multifractal eigenfunctions, and a nonzero dynamical exponent $\ensuremath{\gamma}\ensuremath{\ll}1/2$. The system continues to be subdiffusive even on the ergodic side (
h<hcr) of the MBL transition, where the eigenstates near the mobility edges are multifractal. For
h<h0<hcr, the system is superdiffusive with $\ensuremath{\gamma}>1/2$. The rich phase diagram obtained here is unique to the random nature of long-range interactions. We explain this in terms of the enhanced correlations among local energies of the effective Anderson model induced by random power-law interactions.