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

DOI10.1098/RSTA.2016.0428zbMATH Open1404.82036arXiv1707.00004OpenAlexW2724921322WikidataQ47626506 ScholiaQ47626506MaRDI QIDQ4644932FDOQ4644932

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Publication date: 9 January 2019

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

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.

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

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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)

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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

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