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arXiv:2206.08387 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Effects of autocorrelated disorder on the dynamics in the vicinity of the many-body localization transition

Isaías Vallejo-Fabila, Eduardo Jonathan Torres-Herrera

Published Dec 7, 2022• 5 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The presence of frozen uncorrelated random on-site potential in interacting quantum systems can induce a transition from an ergodic phase to a localized one, the so-called many-body localization. Here we numerically study the effects of autocorrelated disorder on the static and dynamical properties of a one-dimensional many-body quantum system which exhibits many-body localization. Specifically, by means of some standard measures of energy level repulsion and localization of energy eigenstates, we show that a strong degree of correlations between the on-site potentials in the one-dimensional spin-1/2 Heisenberg model leads to suppression of the many-body localization phase, while level repulsion is mitigated for small disorder strengths, although energy eigenstates remain well extended. Our findings are also remarkably manifested in the time domain, on which we put the main emphasis, as shown by the time evolution of experimentally relevant observables, like the return probability and the spin autocorrelation function.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.106.l220201

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The presence of frozen uncorrelated random on-site potential in interacting quantum systems can induce a transition from an ergodic phase to a localized one, the so-called many-body localization. Here we numerically study the effects of autocorrelated disorder on the static and dynamical properties of a one-dimensional many-body quantum system which exhibits many-body localization. Specifically, by means of some standard measures of energy level repulsion and localization of energy eigenstates, we show that a strong degree of correlations between the on-site potentials in the one-dimensional spin-1/2 Heisenberg model leads to suppression of the many-body localization phase, while level repulsion is mitigated for small disorder strengths, although energy eigenstates remain well extended. Our findings are also remarkably manifested in the time domain, on which we put the main emphasis, as shown by the time evolution of experimentally relevant observables, like the return probability and the spin autocorrelation function.
In the presence of strong enough disorder one-dimensional systems of interacting spinless fermions at nonzero filling factor are known to be in a many-body localized phase. When represented in `Fock space,' the Hamiltonian of such a system looks like that of a single `particle' hopping on a Fock lattice in the presence of a random disordered potential. The coordination number of the Fock lattice increases linearly with the system size LLL in one dimension. Thus in the thermodynamic limit $L\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, the disordered interacting problem in one dimension maps on to an Anderson model with infinite coordination number. Despite this, this system displays localization which appears counterintuitive. A close observation of the on-site disorder potentials on the Fock lattice reveals a large degree of correlation among them as they are derived from an exponentially smaller number of on-site disorder potentials in real space. This indicates that the correlations between the on-site disorder potentials on a Fock lattice has a strong effect on the localization properties of the corresponding many-body system. This intuition is also consistent with studies of quantum random energy model where the typical mid-spectrum states are ergodic and the on-site potentials in Fock space are completely uncorrelated. In this work we perform a systematic quantitative exploration of the nature of correlations of the Fock space potential required for localization. We study different functional variations of the disorder correlation in Fock lattice by analyzing the eigenspectrum obtained through exact diagonalization. Without changing the typical strength of the on-site disorder potential in Fock lattice we show that changing the correlation strength can induce thermalization or localization in systems. From among the various forms of correlations we study, we find that only the linear variation of correlations with Hamming distance in Fock space is able to drive a thermal-MBL phase transition where the transition is driven by the correlation strength. Systems with the other forms of correlations we study are found to be ergodic.
The many-body localization transition for a Heisenberg spin chain with a speckle disorder is studied. Such a model is equivalent to a system of spinless fermions in an optical lattice with an additional speckle field. Our numerical results show that the many-body localization transition in speckle disorder falls within the same universality class as the transition in an uncorrelated random disorder, in contrast to the quasiperiodic potential typically studied in experiments. This hints at possibilities of experimental studies of the role of rare Griffiths regions and of the interplay of ergodic and localized grains at the many-body localization transition. Moreover, the speckle potential allows one to study the role of correlations in disorder on the transition. We study both spectral and dynamical properties of the system focusing on observables that are sensitive to the disorder type and its correlations. In particular, distributions of local imbalance at long times provide an experimentally available tool that reveals the presence of small ergodic grains even deep in the many-body localized phase in a correlated speckle disorder.
We study the real-time dynamics of local occupation numbers in a one-dimensional model of spinless fermions with a random on-site potential for a certain class of initial states. The latter are thermal (mixed or pure) states of the model in the presence of an additional static force but become nonequilibrium states after a sudden removal of this static force. For this class and high temperatures, we show that the induced dynamics is given by a single correlation function at equilibrium, independent of the initial expectation values being prepared close to equilibrium (by a weak static force) or far away from equilibrium (by a strong static force). Remarkably, this type of universality holds true in both the ergodic phase and the many-body localized regime. Moreover, it does not depend on the specific choice of a unit cell for the local density. We particularly discuss two important consequences. First, the long-time expectation value of the local density is uniquely determined by the fluctuations of its diagonal matrix elements in the energy eigenbasis. Thus, the validity of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is not only a sufficient but also a necessary condition for thermalization. Second, the real-time broadening of density profiles is always given by the current autocorrelation function at equilibrium via a generalized Einstein relation. In the context of transport, we discuss the influence of disorder for large particle-particle interactions, where normal diffusion is known to occur in the disorder-free case. Our results suggest that normal diffusion is stable against weak disorder, while they are consistent with anomalous diffusion for stronger disorder below the localization transition. Particularly, for weak disorder, Gaussian density profiles can be observed for single disorder realizations, which we demonstrate for finite lattices up to 31 sites.
Recent theoretical and numerical evidence suggests that localization can survive in disordered many-body systems with very high energy density, provided that interactions are sufficiently weak. Stronger interactions can destroy localization, leading to a so-called many-body localization transition. This dynamical phase transition is relevant to questions of thermalization in extended quantum systems far from the zero-temperature limit. It separates a many-body localized phase, in which localization prevents transport and thermalization, from a conducting (``ergodic'') phase in which the usual assumptions of quantum statistical mechanics hold. Here, we present numerical evidence that many-body localization also occurs in models without disorder but rather a quasiperiodic potential. In one dimension, these systems already have a single-particle localization transition, and we show that this transition becomes a many-body localization transition upon the introduction of interactions. We also comment on possible relevance of our results to experimental studies of many-body dynamics of cold atoms and nonlinear light in quasiperiodic potentials.
The real-time dynamics of equal-site correlation functions is studied for one-dimensional spin models with quenched disorder.Focusing on infinite temperature, we present a comparison between the dynamics of models with different quantum numbers S = 1 2 , 1, 3 2 , as well as of chains consisting of classical spins.Based on this comparison as well as by analyzing the statistics of energy-level spacings, we show that the putative many-body localization transition is shifted to considerably stronger values of disorder for increasing S. In this context, we introduce an effective disorder strength W eff , which provides a mapping between the dynamics for different spin quantum numbers.For small W eff , we show that the real-time correlations become essentially independent of S, and are moreover very well captured by the dynamics of classical spins.Especially for S = 3 2 , the agreement between quantum and classical dynamics is remarkably observed even for very strong values of disorder.This behavior also reflects itself in the corresponding spectral functions, which are obtained via a Fourier transform from the time to the frequency domain.As an aside, we also comment on the self-averaging properties of the correlation function at weak and strong disorder.Our work sheds light on the correspondence between quantum and classical dynamics at high temperatures and extends our understanding of the dynamics in disordered spin chains beyond the well-studied case of S = 1 2 .
Many-body localization for a system of bosons trapped in a one-dimensional lattice is discussed. Two models that may be realized for cold atoms in optical lattices are considered. The model with a random on-site potential is compared with previously introduced random interactions model. While the origin and character of the disorder in both systems is different they show interesting similar properties. In particular, many-body localization appears for a sufficiently large disorder as verified by a time evolution of initial density wave states as well as using statistical properties of energy levels for small system sizes. Starting with different initial states, we observe that the localization properties are energy-dependent which reveals an inverted many-body localization edge in both systems (that finding is also verified by statistical analysis of energy spectrum). Moreover, we consider computationally challenging regime of transition between many body localized and extended phases where we observe a characteristic algebraic decay of density correlations which may be attributed to subdiffusion (and Griffiths-like regions) in the studied systems. Ergodicity breaking in the disordered Bose–Hubbard models is compared with the slowing-down of the time evolution of the clean system at large interactions.