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arXiv:2206.00023 · The European Physical Journal D

Dynamical conductivity of disordered quantum chains

Shintaro Takayoshi, Thierry Giamarchi

Published Nov 1, 2022• 3 citations

Abstract

Abstract We study the transport properties of a one-dimensional quantum system with disorder. We numerically compute the frequency dependence of the conductivity of a fermionic chain with nearest-neighbor interaction and a random chemical potential by using the Chebyshev matrix product state (CheMPS) method. As a benchmark, we investigate the noninteracting case first. Comparison with exact diagonalization and analytical solutions demonstrates that the results of CheMPS are reliable over a wide range of frequencies. We then calculate the dynamical conductivity spectra of the interacting system for various values of the interaction and disorder strengths. In the high-frequency regime, the conductivity decays as a power law, with an interaction-dependent exponent. This behavior is qualitatively consistent with the bosonized field theory predictions, although the numerical evaluation of the exponent shows deviations from the analytically expected values. We also compute the characteristic pinning frequency at which a peak in the conductivity appears. We confirm that it is directly related to the inverse of the localization length, even in the interacting case. We demonstrate that the localization length follows a power law of the disorder strength with an exponent dependent on the interaction, and find good quantitative agreement with the field theory predictions. In the low-frequency regime, we find a behavior consistent with the one of the noninteracting system $$\omega ^{2}(\ln \omega )^{2}$$ ω 2 ( ln ω ) 2 independently of the interaction. We discuss the consequences of our finding for experiments in cold atomic gases. Graphical abstract

DOI: 10.1140/epjd/s10053-022-00524-1

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arXiv:1603.01526•Physical review. B./Physical review. B•Jul 20, 2016•72 citations

Abstract We study the transport properties of a one-dimensional quantum system with disorder. We numerically compute the frequency dependence of the conductivity of a fermionic chain with nearest-neighbor interaction and a random chemical potential by using the Chebyshev matrix product state (CheMPS) method. As a benchmark, we investigate the noninteracting case first. Comparison with exact diagonalization and analytical solutions demonstrates that the results of CheMPS are reliable over a wide range of frequencies. We then calculate the dynamical conductivity spectra of the interacting system for various values of the interaction and disorder strengths. In the high-frequency regime, the conductivity decays as a power law, with an interaction-dependent exponent. This behavior is qualitatively consistent with the bosonized field theory predictions, although the numerical evaluation of the exponent shows deviations from the analytically expected values. We also compute the characteristic pinning frequency at which a peak in the conductivity appears. We confirm that it is directly related to the inverse of the localization length, even in the interacting case. We demonstrate that the localization length follows a power law of the disorder strength with an exponent dependent on the interaction, and find good quantitative agreement with the field theory predictions. In the low-frequency regime, we find a behavior consistent with the one of the noninteracting system

\omega ^{2}(\ln \omega )^{2}

ω 2 ( ln ω ) 2 independently of the interaction. We discuss the consequences of our finding for experiments in cold atomic gases. Graphical abstract

We study the spin transport properties of some disordered spin chains with a special focus on the distribution of the frequency-dependent spin conductivity. In the cases of interest here, the systems are governed by an effectively infinite disorder at low energies. A hallmark of this behavior is the wide discrepancy between the average and the typical values of some physical quantities, which are described by extremely broad distributions. We show that such is also the case of the spin conductivity, whose average value is metallic but whose typical one, the physically relevant quantity, is insulating. This solves the apparent contradiction between the prediction of a spin metallic phase of the spin-1/2 disordered XX chain and its known localized behavior (after a mapping to free fermions). Our results are based on analytical and numerical implementations of a strong-disorder renormalization group as well as exact diagonalization studies. We present our analyses in very general terms, valid for systems of any spin

S

value, but the cases of

S=1/2

and 1 are studied in greater detail.

We present results on the low-frequency dynamical and transport properties of random quantum systems whose low temperature

(T),

low-energy behavior is controlled by strong-disorder fixed points. We obtain the momentum- and frequency-dependent dynamic structure factor in the random singlet (RS) phases of both spin-1/2 and spin-1 random antiferromagnetic chains, as well as in the random dimer and Ising antiferromagnetic phases of spin-1/2 random antiferromagnetic chains. We show that the RS phases are unusual ``spin metals'' with divergent low-frequency spin conductivity at

T=0,

and we also follow the conductivity through ``metal-insulator'' transitions tuned by the strength of dimerization or Ising anisotropy in the spin-1/2 case, and by the strength of disorder in the spin-1 case. We work out the average spin and energy autocorrelations in the one-dimensional random transverse-field Ising model in the vicinity of its quantum critical point. All of the above calculations are valid in the frequency-dominated regime $\ensuremath{\omega}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}T,$ and rely on previously available renormalization group schemes that describe these systems in terms of the properties of certain strong-disorder fixed-point theories. In addition, we obtain some information about the behavior of the dynamic structure factor and dynamical conductivity in the opposite ``hydrodynamic'' regime $\ensuremath{\omega}<T$ for the special case of spin-1/2 chains close to the planar limit (the quantum $x\ensuremath{-}y$ model) by analyzing the corresponding quantities in an equivalent model of spinless fermions with weak repulsive interactions and particle-hole symmetric disorder.

Dynamical conductivity in a disordered one-dimensional model of interacting fermions is studied numerically at high temperatures and in the weak-interaction regime in order to find a signature of many-body localization and vanishing dc transport coefficients. On the contrary, we find in the regime of moderately strong local disorder that the dc conductivity ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{0}$ scales linearly with the interaction strength while being exponentially dependent on the disorder. According to the behavior of the charge stiffness evaluated at the fixed number of particles, the absence of the many-body localization seems related to an increase in the effective localization length with the interaction.

We explore transport properties in a disordered nonlinear chain of classical harmonic oscillators, and thereby identify a regime exhibiting behavior analogous to that seen in quantum many-body-localized systems. Through extensive numerical simulations of this system connected at its ends to heat baths at different temperatures, we computed the heat current and the temperature profile in the nonequilibrium steady state as a function of system size N, disorder strength Δ, and temperature T. The conductivity κ_{N}, obtained for finite length (N), saturates to a value κ_{∞}>0 in the large N limit, for all values of disorder strength Δ and temperature T>0. We show evidence that for any Δ>0 the conductivity goes to zero faster than any power of T in the (T/Δ)→0 limit, and find that the form κ_{∞}∼e^{-B|ln(CΔ/T)|^{3}} fits our data. This form has earlier been suggested by a theory based on the dynamics of multioscillator chaotic islands. The finite-size effect can be κ_{N}<κ_{∞} due to boundary resistance when the bulk conductivity is high (the weak disorder case), or κ_{N}>κ_{∞} due to direct bath-to-bath coupling through bulk localized modes when the bulk is weakly conducting (the strong disorder case). We also present results on equilibrium dynamical correlation functions and on the role of chaos on transport properties. Finally, we explore the differences in the growth and propagation of chaos in the weak and strong chaos regimes by studying the classical version of the out-of-time-ordered commutator.

We study the disordered Heisenberg spin chain, which exhibits many body localization at strong disorder, in the weak to moderate disorder regime. A continued fraction calculation of dynamical correlations is devised, using a variational extrapolation of recurrents. Good convergence for the infinite chain limit is shown. We find that the local spin correlations decay at long times as

C \sim t^{-\beta}

, while the conductivity exhibits a low frequency power law

\sigma \sim \omega^{\alpha}

. The exponents depict sub-diffusive behavior $ \beta 0 $ at all finite disorders, and convergence to the scaling result,

\alpha+2\beta = 1

, at large disorders.

We present a numerical study of the many-body localization (MBL) phenomenon in the high-temperature limit within an anisotropic Heisenberg model with random local fields. Taking the dynamical spin conductivity $\ensuremath{\sigma}(\ensuremath{\omega})$ as the test quantity, we investigate the full frequency dependence of sample-to-sample fluctuations and their scaling properties as a function of the system size $L\ensuremath{\le}28$ and the frequency resolution. We identify differences between the general interacting case $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}>0$ and the anisotropy $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Delta}}=0$, the latter corresponding to the standard Anderson localization. Except for the extreme MBL case when the relative sample-to-sample fluctuations became large, numerical results allow for the extraction of the low-$\ensuremath{\omega}$ dependence of the conductivity. Results for the dc value ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{0}$ indicate a crossover into the MBL regime, i.e., an exponential-like variation with the disorder strength

W

. For the same regime, our numerical analysis indicates that the low-frequency exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ exhibits a small departure from $\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{\sim}1$ only.