Many-body localization in a quasiperiodic system

By Shankar Iyer, V. Oganesyan, G. Refael, D. Huse. 2012

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent theoretical and numerical evidence suggests that localization can survive in disordered many-body systems with very high energy density, provided that interactions are sufficiently weak. Stronger interactions can destroy localization, leading to a so-called many-body localization transition. This dynamical phase transition is relevant to questions of thermalization in extended quantum systems far from the zero-temperature limit. It separates a many-body localized phase, in which localization prevents transport and thermalization, from a conducting ("ergodic") phase in which the usual assumptions of quantum statistical mechanics hold. Here, we present numerical evidence that many-body localization also occurs in models without disorder but rather a quasiperiodic potential. In one dimension, these systems already have a single-particle localization transition, and we show that this transition becomes a many-body localization transition upon the introduction of interactions. We also comment on possible relevance of our results to experimental studies of many-body dynamics of cold atoms and non-linear light in quasiperiodic potentials.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cb46563bb3639f5fb4bb69419d626c424419d3a

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. V. Khemani
2. D. Abanin
3. Maksym Serbyn
4. I. Bloch
5. R. Nandkishore
6. E. Altman
7. M. Hermele
8. D. Huse

Citations in the corpus

• Localization from Hilbert space shattering: From theory to physical realizations (2020, background): “The incommensurate potential may also lead to quasiperiodic MBL [65, 66] along the flat direction for strong enough tilt, in which case only t∗ will be relevant and both Px, Py look conserved for this time.”
• Hilbert-Glass Transition: New Universality of Temperature-Tuned Many-Body Dynamical Quantum Criticality (2013, unknown): “in quasiperiodic systems without disorder [13].”
• Colloquium : Many-body localization, thermalization, and entanglement (2018, background): “sults (Iyer et al., 2013; Michal et al., 2014), indicates that MBL can also occur in system with quasiperiodic detuning potentials.”
• Many-body localization: An introduction and selected topics (2017, unknown): “The nature of the disorder is encoded in the distribution of hi: the most-studied distributions are the box distribution (hi uniformly distributed in [−h, h]), the bimodal distribution hi = h (−h) with a probability p (1− p) [77, 45], and the quasi-periodic case hi = h cos(2βπi) with β an irrational”