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arXiv:2502.01399 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Universal fluctuations of two localized interacting particles in one dimension

Sen Mu, Gabriel Lemarié, Jiangbin Gong

Published Jun 16, 2025• 1 citation
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Abstract

We investigate the universal fluctuations of localized wave functions in the Fock space of two interacting particles in one-dimensional disordered systems, focusing on the interplay between random potentials and random long-range interactions. By mapping the system onto a directed polymer problem, we show that random potentials alone produce correlated energies for the sites in the Fock space, giving rise to the fluctuation growth exponent 1 / 2 . Introducing random long-range interactions alters these correlations and drives the system's fluctuations into the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class in (1+1)D with the exponent 1 / 3 . To validate the universality of the observed fluctuation scaling, we study a complex directed polymer model with competing point and columnar disorder. Our results confirm that columnar disorder corresponds to on-site energies in the Fock space from the random potentials, while point disorder models the effects of random long-range interactions between the two particles. These findings provide new insights into the Fock-space perspective for examining disordered quantum many-body systems, and they emphasize the critical role of disorder structure in determining the universality class of fluctuations in localized quantum systems.

DOI
10.1103/7d45-yrwq

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We investigate the universal fluctuations of localized wave functions in the Fock space of two interacting particles in one-dimensional disordered systems, focusing on the interplay between random potentials and random long-range interactions. By mapping the system onto a directed polymer problem, we show that random potentials alone produce correlated energies for the sites in the Fock space, giving rise to the fluctuation growth exponent 1 / 2 . Introducing random long-range interactions alters these correlations and drives the system's fluctuations into the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class in (1+1)D with the exponent 1 / 3 . To validate the universality of the observed fluctuation scaling, we study a complex directed polymer model with competing point and columnar disorder. Our results confirm that columnar disorder corresponds to on-site energies in the Fock space from the random potentials, while point disorder models the effects of random long-range interactions between the two particles. These findings provide new insights into the Fock-space perspective for examining disordered quantum many-body systems, and they emphasize the critical role of disorder structure in determining the universality class of fluctuations in localized quantum systems.
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Despite decades of research, the universal nature of fluctuations in disordered quantum systems remains poorly understood. Here, we present extensive numerical evidence that fluctuations in two-dimensional (2D) Anderson localization belongs to the (1+1)-dimensional Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. In turn, by adopting the KPZ framework, we gain fresh insight into the structure and phenomenology of Anderson localization itself. We analyze both localized eigenstates and time-evolved wave packets, demonstrating that the fluctuation of their logarithmic density follows the KPZ scaling. Moreover, we reveal that the internal structure of these eigenstates exhibits glassy features characteristic of the directed polymer problem, including the emergence of dominant paths together with pinning and avalanche behavior. Localization is not isotropic but organized along preferential branches of weaker confinement, corresponding to these dominant paths. For localized wave packets, we further demonstrate that their spatial profiles obey a stretched-exponential form consistent with the KPZ scaling, while remaining fully compatible with the single-parameter scaling (SPS) hypothesis, a cornerstone of Anderson localization theory. Altogether, our results establish a unified KPZ framework for describing fluctuations and microscopic organization in 2D Anderson localization, revealing the glassy nature of localized states and providing new understanding into the universal structure of disordered quantum systems.
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Many-body localization in interacting quantum systems can be cast as a disordered hopping problem on the underlying Fock-space graph. A crucial feature of the effective Fock-space disorder is that the Fock-space site energies are strongly correlated-maximally so for sites separated by a finite distance on the graph. Motivated by this, and to understand the effect of such correlations more fundamentally, we study Anderson localization on Cayley trees and random regular graphs, with maximally correlated disorder. Since such correlations suppress short distance fluctuations in the disorder potential, one might naively suppose they disfavor localization. We find however that there exists an Anderson transition, and indeed that localization is more robust in the sense that the critical disorder scales with graph connectivity K as sqrt[K], in marked contrast to KlnK in the uncorrelated case. This scaling is argued to be intimately connected to the stability of many-body localization. Our analysis centers on an exact recursive formulation for the local propagators as well as a self-consistent mean-field theory; with results corroborated using exact diagonalization.
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We investigate Anderson transitions for a system of two particles moving in a three-dimensional disordered lattice and subject to on-site (Hubbard) interactions of strength UUU. The two-body problem is exactly mapped into an effective single-particle equation for the center-of-mass motion, whose localization properties are studied numerically. We show that, for zero total energy of the pair, the transition occurs in a regime where all single-particle states are localized. In particular, the critical disorder strength exhibits a nonmonotonic behavior as a function of ∣U∣|U|∣U∣, increasing sharply for weak interactions and converging to a finite value in the strong-coupling limit. Within our numerical accuracy, short-range interactions do not affect the universality class of the transition.