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Hilbert Space Fragmentation and Many-Body Localization

Francesca Pietracaprina, Nicolas Laflorencie

Published Jun 13, 2019• 15 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Investigating many-body localization (MBL) using exact numerical methods is limited by the exponential growth of the Hilbert space. However, localized eigenstates display multifractality and only extend over a vanishing fraction of the Hilbert space. Here, building on this remarkable property, we develop a simple yet efficient decimation scheme to discard the irrelevant parts of the Hilbert space of the random-field Heisenberg chain. This leads to an Hilbert space fragmentation in small clusters, allowing to access larger systems at strong disorder. The MBL transition is quantitatively predicted, together with a geometrical interpretation of MBL multifractality.

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•Mar 15, 2016•2 citations
Investigating many-body localization (MBL) using exact numerical methods is limited by the exponential growth of the Hilbert space. However, localized eigenstates display multifractality and only extend over a vanishing fraction of the Hilbert space. Here, building on this remarkable property, we develop a simple yet efficient decimation scheme to discard the irrelevant parts of the Hilbert space of the random-field Heisenberg chain. This leads to an Hilbert space fragmentation in small clusters, allowing to access larger systems at strong disorder. The MBL transition is quantitatively predicted, together with a geometrical interpretation of MBL multifractality.
We study many-body localization (MBL) in a pair-hopping model exhibiting strong fragmentation of the Hilbert space. We show that several Krylov subspaces have both ergodic statistics in the thermodynamic limit and a dimension that scales much slower than the full Hilbert space but still exponentially. Such a property allows us to study the MBL phase transition in systems including up to 64 spins. The different Krylov spaces that we consider show clear signatures of a many-body localization transition, both in the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the distribution of their level spacing ratio and their entanglement properties. However, they also present distinct scalings with the system size. Depending on the subspace, the critical disorder strength can be nearly independent of the system size or conversely show an approximately linear increase with the number of spins.
We develop a systematic theory of spectral decimation for quantum many-body Hamiltonians and show that it provides a quantitative probe of emergent symmetries in statistically mixed spectra. Building on an analytical description of statistical mixtures, we derive an explicit expression for the size of a characteristic symmetry sector (CSS), defined as the largest subsequence of levels exhibiting non-Poissonian correlations. The CSS dimension is shown to be the size-biased average of the underlying symmetry sectors, establishing a direct link between spectral statistics and Hilbert-space structure. We apply this framework to two paradigmatic settings: Hilbert-space fragmentation and disorder-induced many-body localization (MBL). In fragmented systems, the CSS reproduces the mixture prediction and isolates correlated subsectors even when the full spectrum appears nearly Poissonian. In the disordered Heisenberg chain, spectral decimation reveals the gradual emergence of integrability through a shrinking CSS, whose statistics exhibit signatures consistent with local integrals of motion. We introduce a characteristic symmetry entropy (CSE) as a finite-size scaling observable and extract, within accessible system sizes, the crossover exponents. Our results establish spectral decimation as a controlled, unbiased and computationally inexpensive diagnostic of hidden structure in many-body spectra, capable of distinguishing between chaotic dynamics, statistical mixtures, and emergent integrability.
In this paper we propose a new perspective to analyze the many-body localization (MBL) transition when recast in terms of a single-particle tight-binding model in the space of many-body configurations. We compute the distribution of tunneling rates between many-body states separated by an extensive number of spin flips at the leading order in perturbation theory starting from the insulator and determine the scaling of their typical amplitude with the number of accessible states in the Hilbert space. By using an analogy with the Rosenzweig-Porter random matrix ensemble, we propose an ergodicity breaking criterion for the MBL transition based on the Fermi golden rule. According to this criterion, in the MBL phase many resonances are formed at large distance from an infinite temperature initial state, but they are not enough for the quantum dynamics to decorrelate from it in a finite time. This implies that, differently from Anderson localized states, in the insulating phase many-body eigenstates are multifractal in the Hilbert space, as they occupy a large but subexponential part of the total volume, in agreement with recent numerical results, perturbative calculations, and intuitive arguments. Possible limitations and implications of our interpretation are discussed in the conclusions.
In contrast with Anderson localization where a genuine localization is observed in real space, the many-body localization (MBL) problem is much less understood in Hilbert space, the support of the eigenstates. In this Letter, using exact diagonalization techniques we address the ergodicity properties in the underlying N-dimensional complex networks spanned by various computational bases for up to L=24 spin-1/2 particles (i.e., Hilbert space of size N≃2.7×10^{6}). We report fully ergodic eigenstates in the delocalized phase (irrespective of the computational basis), while the MBL regime features a generically (basis-dependent) multifractal behavior, delocalized but nonergodic. The MBL transition is signaled by a nonuniversal jump of the multifractal dimensions.
Abstract For short-ranged disordered quantum models in one dimension, the many-body-localization is analyzed via the adaptation to the many-body context (Serbyn et al 2015 Phys. Rev . X 5 041047) of the Thouless point of view on the Anderson transition: the question is whether a local interaction between two long chains is able to reshuffle completely the eigenstates (delocalized phase with a volume-law entanglement) or whether the hybridization between tensor states remains limited (many-body-localized phase with an area-law entanglement). The central object is thus the level of hybridization induced by the matrix elements of local operators, as compared with the difference of diagonal energies. The multifractal analysis of these matrix elements of local operators is used to analyze the corresponding statistics of resonances. Our main conclusion is that the critical point is characterized by the strong-multifractality spectrum f ( 0 ⩽ α ⩽ 2 ) = α 2 , well known in the context of Anderson localization in spaces of effective infinite dimensionality, where the size of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the volume. Finally, the possibility of a delocalized non-ergodic phase near criticality is discussed.
For short-ranged disordered quantum models in one dimension, the Many-Body-Localization is analyzed via the adaptation to the Many-Body context [M. Serbyn, Z. Papic and D.A. Abanin, PRX 5, 041047 (2015)] of the Thouless point of view on the Anderson transition : the question is whether a local interaction between two long chains is able to reshuffle completely the eigenstates (Delocalized phase with a volume-law entanglement) or whether the hybridization between tensor states remains limited (Many-Body-Localized Phase with an area-law entanglement). The central object is thus the level of Hybridization induced by the matrix elements of local operators, as compared with the difference of diagonal energies. The multifractal analysis of these matrix elements of local operators is used to analyze the corresponding statistics of resonances. Our main conclusion is that the critical point is characterized by the Strong-Multifractality Spectrum f(0≤α≤2)=α2f(0 \leq \alpha \leq 2)=\frac{\alpha}{2}f(0≤α≤2)=2α​, well known in the context of Anderson Localization in spaces of effective infinite dimensionality, where the size of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the volume. As a consequence, the level statistics at criticality is the closest possible to the Poisson statistics of the Localized phase, and the Delocalized phase near the critical point is not ergodic.