Ergodic inclusions in many body localized systems

Author:

Luis Colmenarez, David J. Luitz, Wojciech De Roeck

Keyword:

Condensed Matter, Disordered Systems and Neural Networks, Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn), Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech), Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el), Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

journal:

date:

2023-08-01 16:00:00

Abstract

We investigate the effect of ergodic inclusions in putative many-body localized systems. To this end, we consider the random field Heisenberg chain, which is many-body localized at strong disorder and we couple it to an ergodic bubble, modeled by a random matrix Hamiltonian. Recent theoretical work suggests that the ergodic bubble destabilizes the apparent localized phase at intermediate disorder strength and finite sizes. We tentatively confirm this by numerically analyzing the response of the local thermality, quantified by one-site purities, to the insertion of the bubble. For a range of intermediate disorder strengths, this response decays very slowly, or not at all, with increasing distance to the bubble. This suggests that at those disorder strengths, the system is delocalized in the thermodynamic limit. However, the numerics is unfortunately not unambiguous and we cannot definitely rule out artefacts.

PDF: Ergodic inclusions in many body localized systems.pdf