Thermal inclusions: how one spin can destroy a many-body localized phase

DOI10.1098/RSTA.2016.0428MaRDI QIDQ4644932zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors

Publication date 9 January 2019

Published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00004

zbMATH Keywords

thermalizationmany-body localizationeigenstate thermalization hypothesiscentral spin modelnon-ergodic delocalized phasethermal inclusions

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Quantum dynamics and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics (general) (82C10)

Abstract: Many-body localized (MBL) systems lie outside the framework of statistical mechanics, as they fail to equilibrate under their own quantum dynamics. Even basic features of MBL systems such as their stability to thermal inclusions and the nature of the dynamical transition to thermalizing behavior remain poorly understood. We study a simple model to address these questions: a two level system interacting with strength $J$ with $Ngg1$ localized bits subject to random fields. On increasing $J$, the system transitions from a MBL to a delocalized phase on the emph{vanishing} scale $J_c(N)sim1/N$, up to logarithmic corrections. In the transition region, the single-site eigenstate entanglement entropies exhibit bi-modal distributions, so that localized bits are either "on" (strongly entangled) or "off" (weakly entangled) in eigenstates. The clusters of "on" bits vary significantly between eigenstates of the emph{same} sample, which provides evidence for a heterogenous discontinuous transition out of the localized phase in single-site observables. We obtain these results by perturbative mapping to bond percolation on the hypercube at small $J$ and by numerical exact diagonalization of the full many-body system. Our results imply the MBL phase is unstable in systems with short-range interactions and quenched randomness in dimensions $d$ that are high but finite.

Recommendations

• Low-temperature localisation for continuous spin-systems
• Thermal phase transition for some spin-boson models
• Locally nonequilibrium magnetic excitations in insulators
• Dynamics of thermal effects in the spin-wave theory of quantum antiferromagnets
• Many-body localization transition in the Heisenberg Ising chain
• A QUANTUM MANY-BODY INSTABILITY IN THE THERMODYNAMIC LIMIT
• Disorder-induced phase transitions in a spinful one-dimensional system
• Asymptotic quantum many-body localization from thermal disorder
• Thermal entanglement for interacting spin-\(1/2\) systems and its quantum criticality

Cites work

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1273988 (Why is no real title available?)
• Area laws in a many-body localized state and its implications for topological order
• Exploring the many-body localization transition in two dimensions
• Integrals of motion in the many-body localized phase
• Localization and chaos in a quantum spin glass model in random longitudinal fields: mapping to the localization problem in a Bethe lattice with a correlated disorder
• Many-body localization: construction of the emergent local conserved operators via block real-space renormalization
• Metal--insulator transition in a weakly interacting many-electron system with localized single-particle states
• Observation of many-body localization of interacting fermions in a quasirandom optical lattice
• On many-body localization for quantum spin chains
• Quantum chaos and thermalization in isolated systems of interacting particles
• Random graphs.
• The birth of the infinite cluster: Finite-size scaling in percolation

Cited in

(4)

• Exploring many-body localization in quantum systems coupled to an environment via Wegner-Wilson flows
• The behavior of many-body localization of quasi-disordered spin-\(1/2\) chains
• Can translation invariant systems exhibit a many-body localized phase?
• Absence of many-body localization in a continuum

This page was built for publication: Thermal inclusions: how one spin can destroy a many-body localized phase

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q4644932)