Dynamics close to the many-body localization transition

Henrik P. Lüschen, Pranjal Bordia, Sebastian Scherg +4 more

In the presence of sufficiently strong disorder or quasiperiodic fields, an interacting many-body system can fail to thermalize and become many-body localized. The associated transition is of particular interest, since it occurs not only in the ground state but over an extended range of energy densities. So far, theoretical studies of the transition have focused mainly on the case of true-random disorder. In this work, we experimentally and numerically investigate the regime close to the many-body localization transition in quasiperiodic systems. We find slow relaxation of the density imbalance close to the transition, strikingly similar to the behavior near the transition in true-random systems. This dynamics is found to continuously slow down upon approaching the transition and allows for an estimate of the transition point. We discuss possible microscopic origins of these slow dynamics.

Léa Ferreira dos Santos, Jonathan Torres-Herrera

Maksym Serbyn

David J. Luitz, Yevgeny Bar Lev

Recent studies point towards nontriviality of the ergodic phase in systems exhibiting many‐body localization (MBL), which shows subexponential relaxation of local observables, subdiffusive transport and sublinear spreading of the entanglement entropy. Here we review the dynamical properties of this phase and the available numerically exact and approximate methods for its study. We discuss in which sense this phase could be considered ergodic and present possible phenomenological explanations of its dynamical properties. We close by analyzing to which extent the proposed explanations were verified by numerical studies and present the open questions in this field. image

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.

Sarang Gopalakrishnan, S. A. Parameswaran