Abstract

We study the many-body localization aspects of single-particle mobility edges in fermionic systems. We investigate incommensurate lattices and random disorder Anderson models. Many-body localization and quantum nonergodic properties are studied by comparing entanglement and thermal entropy, and by calculating the scaling of subsystem particle-number fluctuations, respectively. We establish a nonergodic extended phase as a generic intermediate phase (between purely ergodic extended and nonergodic localized phases) for the many-body localization transition of noninteracting fermions where the entanglement entropy manifests a volume law (hence, "extended"), but there are large fluctuations in the subsystem particle numbers (hence, "nonergodic"). Based on the numerical results, we expect such an intermediate phase scenario may continue to hold even for the many-body localization in the presence of interactions as well. We find for many-body fermionic states in noninteracting one-dimensional Aubry-Andre and three-dimensional Anderson models that the entanglement entropy density and the normalized particle-number fluctuation have discontinuous jumps at the localization transition where the entanglement entropy is subthermal but obeys the "volume law." In the vicinity of the localization transition, we find that both the entanglement entropy and the particle-number fluctuations obey a single parameter scaling based on the diverging localization length. We argue using numerical and theoretical results that such a critical scaling behavior should persist for the interacting many-body localization problem with important observable consequences. Our work provides persuasive evidence in favor of there being two transitions in many-body systems with single-particle mobility edges, the first one indicating a transition from the purely localized nonergodic many-body localized phase to a nonergodic extended many-body metallic phase, and the second one being a transition eventually to the usual ergodic many-body extended phase.

Publication Details
Publication Type
Journal Article
Year of Publication
2016
Volume
93
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevB.93.184204
Journal
Physical Review B
Contributors