Localization in the ground state of an interacting quasi-periodic fermionic chain (Q5962910)

The conduction of electrons in a metal is a kind of a fermionic system. It is possible to determine its features, when the interaction between particles is not taken into account. This is done by the eigenfunctions of the single-particle Hamiltonian. When an external periodic potential is present, the eigenfunctions are Bloch waves: the zero temperature-conductivity is vanishing (insulating behavior) or not vanishing (metallic behavior); the Fermi level lies within a gap in the single-particle spectrum or not. Another case in which an external potential can produce an insulating behavior is known as Anderson localization -- the eigenfunctions of the single-particle Hamiltonian can be exponentially localized and this produces an insulating behavior. A realistic description of metals must include the electron-electron interaction, so that the problem of the interplay between localization and interactions naturally arises. First works on this problem concerned the computation of the zero temperature thermodynamical quantities, but in more recent years an attention has been paid to the localization properties of the excited states of interacting disordered many-body systems. There are some powerful methods, based on the version of the renormalization group (RG) used to compute the thermodynamical properties at zero temperature of interacting fermions. There are some difficulties when using these methods; the author analyzes the interplay of localization and interaction in the thermodynamical functions of interacting fermions with a quasi-periodic potential by the RG. They are used for a system of interacting fermions with a large incommensurate potential, a weak short-range interaction and chemical potentials in a gap of the non-interacting one-particle spectrum. The author proves that the zero temperature thermodynamical correlations are exponentially decaying for large distances, with a decay rate much larger than the gap.