Many-body localization phase transition

By A. Pal, D. Huse. 2010

1,168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use exact diagonalization to explore the many-body localization transition in a random-field spin-1/2 chain. We examine the correlations within each many-body eigenstate, looking at all high-energy states and thus effectively working at infinite temperature. For weak random field the eigenstates are thermal, as expected in this nonlocalized, "ergodic" phase. For strong random field the eigenstates are localized, with only short-range entanglement. We roughly locate the localization transition and examine some of its finite-size scaling, finding that this quantum phase transition at nonzero temperature might be showing infinite-randomness scaling with a dynamic critical exponent $z\rightarrow\infty$.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a4082423f6de57a316112976e8c78547f99ba592

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. V. Khemani
2. D. Abanin
3. Maksym Serbyn
4. D. Huse
5. Tomaz Prosen
6. I. Bloch
7. Ashvin Vishwanath
8. J. Moore

Citations in the corpus

• Constructing local integrals of motion in the many-body localized phase (2014, background): “This critical value is consistent with previous numerical studies [21].”
• Integrals of motion in the many-body localized phase (2014, background): “Since the seminal work by Basko, Aleiner and Altshuler [9, 4, 10], the paradigm of many-body localization has attracted a lot of interest, and the phenomenology of MBL phases and the localization transition have been explored, see for example [11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17]).”
• On Many-Body Localization for Quantum Spin Chains (2014, methodology): “This model has random field, random transverse field, and random exchange interactions; it is a variant of the model studied in [6].”
• Quantum Entanglement in Neural Network States (2017, background): “In condensed matter physics, entanglement entropy and spectrum have proven to be powerful tools characterizing topological phases [4, 61–64], quantum phases transitions [65–67], and many-body localization [68–70], etc.”
• Colloquium: Nonequilibrium dynamics of closed interacting quantum systems (2010, background): “More specifically, it has been noticed that a transition from localized to delocalized states either in real space (Pal and Huse, 2010) or more generally in quasi-particle space (Canovi et al., 2011) is closely connected to a corresponding transition from thermal to non-thermal behavior in the…”
• Localization from Hilbert space shattering: From theory to physical realizations (2020, background): “[4] Arijeet Pal and David A.”
• Spectral statistics across the many-body localization transition (2015, methodology): “We use the XXZ spin chain in a random field as a specific model with a previously located MBL transition [11] to test our picture of level statistics.”
• Many-body localization: An introduction and selected topics (2017, neutral): “[5], is now by far the most studied one, making it a paradigmatic example.”