Entanglement in the many-body localized phase and transition

Dmitry A. Abanin

Tarun Grover

Isolated quantum systems at strong disorder can display many-body localization (MBL), a remarkable phenomena characterized by an absence of conduction even at finite temperatures. As the ratio of interactions to disorder is increased, one expects that an MBL phase will eventually undergo a dynamical phase transition to a delocalized phase. Here we constrain the nature of such a transition by exploiting the strong subadditivity of entanglement entropy, as applied to the many-body eigenstates close to the transition in general dimensions. In particular, we show that at a putative continuous transition between an MBL and an ergodic delocalized phase, the critical eigenstates are necessarily thermal, and therefore, the critical entanglement entropy equals the thermal entropy. We also explore a qualitatively different continuous localization-delocalization transition, where the delocalized phase is non-ergodic whose volume law entanglement entropy tends to zero as the transition is approached.

Robert Schittko, Alexander Lukin, Matthew Rispoli +6 more

Abhisek Samanta, Kedar Damle, Rajdeep Sensarma

Some interacting disordered many-body systems are unable to thermalize when the quenched disorder becomes larger than a threshold value. Although several properties of nonzero energy density eigenstates (in the middle of the many-body spectrum) exhibit a qualitative change across this many-body localization (MBL) transition, many of the commonly used diagnostics only do so over a broad transition regime. Here we provide evidence that the transition can be located precisely even at modest system sizes by sharply defined changes in the distribution of extremal eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix of subsystems. In particular, our results suggest that $p*={lim}_{{\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{2}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}ln{(2)}^{+}}{P}_{2}({\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{2})$, where ${P}_{2}({\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{2})$ is the probability distribution of the second lowest entanglement eigenvalue ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{2}$, behaves as an ``order parameter'' for the MBL phase: $p*>0$ in the MBL phase, while $p*=0$ in the ergodic phase with thermalization. Thus, in the MBL phase, there is a nonzero probability that a subsystem is entangled with the rest of the system only via the entanglement of one subsystem qubit with degrees of freedom outside the region. In contrast, this probability vanishes in the thermal phase.

Vedika Khemani, S. P. Lim, D. N. Sheng +1 more

Some quantum systems can enter a many-body localized (MBL) phase, where the particles do not settle into thermal equilibrium but remain stuck in some initial state. A new theoretical analysis explores the transition between MBL and thermal phases and finds that the transition is driven by the growth of a network of quantum entanglement.

J. W. Clark, Hessam Habibian, Aikaterini Mandilara +1 more