An active area of research in quantum many-body physics is the extent to which quenched disorder impedes ``natural'' behaviors, such as transport and thermalization. This is an inherently challenging problem to study, and thus it is particularly valuable to have rigorous results that unambiguously prove the absence of transport in certain situations. This work provides such a result: the author uses here the machinery of Lieb-Robinson bounds to prove that ballistic and even diffusive motion is indeed impossible when the distribution of on-site disorder is sufficiently heavy tailed, regardless of most other details of the Hamiltonian.
An active area of research in quantum many-body physics is the extent to which quenched disorder impedes ``natural'' behaviors, such as transport and thermalization. This is an inherently challenging problem to study, and thus it is particularly valuable to have rigorous results that unambiguously prove the absence of transport in certain situations. This work provides such a result: the author uses here the machinery of Lieb-Robinson bounds to prove that ballistic and even diffusive motion is indeed impossible when the distribution of on-site disorder is sufficiently heavy tailed, regardless of most other details of the Hamiltonian.
By tightening the conventional Lieb-Robinson bounds to better handle systems that lack translation invariance, we determine the extent to which "weak links" suppress operator growth in disordered onedimensional spin chains.In particular, we prove that ballistic growth is impossible when the distribution of coupling strengths μ(J ) has a sufficiently heavy tail at small J and we identify the correct dynamical exponent to use instead.Furthermore, through a detailed analysis of the special case in which the couplings are genuinely random and independent, we find that the standard formulation of Lieb-Robinson bounds is insufficient to capture the complexity of the dynamics-we must distinguish between bounds that hold for all sites of the chain and bounds that hold for a subsequence of sites and we show by explicit example that these two can have dramatically different behaviors.All the same, our result for the dynamical exponent is tight, in that we prove by counterexample that there cannot exist any Lieb-Robinson bound with a smaller exponent.We close by discussing the implications of our results, both major and minor, for numerous applications ranging from quench dynamics to the structure of ground states.
We announce and sketch the rigorous proof of a new kind of anomalous (or sub-ballistic) Lieb-Robinson (LR) bound for an isotropic XY chain in a quasiperiodic transversal magnetic field. Instead of the usual effective light cone $|x|\ensuremath{\le}v|t|$, we obtain $|x|\ensuremath{\le}v|t{|}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ for some $0<\ensuremath{\alpha}<1$. We can characterize the allowed values of $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ exactly as those exceeding the upper transport exponent ${\ensuremath{\alpha}}_{u}^{+}$ of a one-body Schr\"odinger operator. To our knowledge, this is the first rigorous derivation of anomalous quantum many-body transport. We also discuss anomalous LR bounds with power-law tails for a random dimer field.
We study transport in the boundary-driven XX spin chain with onsite disorder and randomly positioned onsite dephasing, observing a transition from diffusive to subdiffusive spin transport below a critical density of sites with dephasing. We then present an exactly solvable semiclassical model of conductors and insulators, which exhibits both diffusive and subdiffusive phases, and qualitatively reproduces the results of the quantum system. The subdiffusion in these models is a consequence of rare insulating regions, and they therefore exhibit, in a more controlled setup, the physics of which have been conjectured to cause the subdiffusive transport observed in interacting many-body localizable systems. For the quantum model we show that finite-size effects come from the interplay of three characteristic lengths: one associated with disorder (the localization length), one with dephasing, and the third with the percolation problem defining large, rare, insulating regions. The latter grows logarithmically with system size, and we conjecture that this may be the reason why the heavy-tailed distributions typical of Griffiths effects have not been observed in subdiffusive interacting systems.
Understanding the spread of quantum entanglement and scrambling of information across a quantum many-body system is a fundamental problem in quantum dynamics. A necessary part of the spread of the entanglement is the growth in time of Heisenberg operators of initially localized operators. This operator growth can be diagnosed by studying the space-time structure of commutators of well-separated operators. Previous studies in this area focused on translation invariant models, but the effects of disorder, which can radically alter the motion of heat and charge, had not been studied. Here, the authors study the growth of operators in interacting systems with quenched disorder. In the localized phase, they find that operator sizes grow logarithmically in time similar to other measures of entanglement spreading. In the disordered metal, they find that operator sizes grow linearly with time, i.e., ballistically, in contrast to the diffusive motion of charge and heat. The ballistic growth of operators is quantified by the butterfly velocity which the authors relate to the charge diffusion constant and the interaction-induced inelastic scattering rate. When the diffusion of charge is slow, the resulting butterfly velocity is much smaller than the maximum speed allowed by microscopic causality constraints.
We consider a quantum spin chain with nearest neighbor interactions and sparsely distributed on-site impurities. We prove commutator bounds for its Heisenberg dynamics which incorporate the coupling strengths of the impurities. The impurities are assumed to satisfy a minimum spacing, and each impurity has a non-degenerate spectrum. Our results are proven in a broadly applicable setting, both in finite volume and in thermodynamic limit. We apply our results to improve Lieb–Robinson bounds for the Heisenberg spin chain with a random, sparse transverse field drawn from a heavy-tailed distribution.
Lieb-Robinson bounds demonstrate the emergence of locality in many-body quantum systems. Intuitively, Lieb-Robinson bounds state that, with local or exponentially decaying interactions, the correlation that can be built up between two sites separated by distance r after a time t decays as exp ( v t − r ) , where v is the emergent Lieb-Robinson velocity. In many problems, it is important to also capture how much of an operator grows to act on r d sites in d spatial dimensions. Perturbation theory and cluster expansion methods suggest that, at short times, these volume-filling operators are suppressed as exp ( − r d ) . We confirm this intuition, showing that, for r > v t , the volume-filling operator is suppressed by exp ( − ( r − v t ) d / ( v t ) d − 1 ) . This closes a conceptual and practical gap between the cluster expansion and the Lieb-Robinson bound. We then present two very different applications of this new bound. Firstly, we obtain improved bounds on the classical computational resources necessary to simulate many-body dynamics with error tolerance ε for any finite time t : as ε becomes sufficiently small, only ε − O ( t d − 1 ) resources are needed. A protocol that likely saturates this bound is given. Secondly, we prove that disorder operators have volume-law suppression near the “solvable (Ising) point” in quantum phases with spontaneous symmetry breaking, which implies a new diagnostic for distinguishing many-body phases of quantum matter.