In presence of strong enough disorder one dimensional systems of interacting spinless fermions at non-zero filling factor are known to be in a many body localized phase. When represented in 'Fock space', the Hamiltonian of such a system looks like that of a single 'particle' hopping on a Fock lattice in the presence of a random disordered potential. The coordination number of the Fock lattice increases linearly with the system size L in one dimension. Thus in the thermodynamic limit L → ∞, the disordered interacting problem in one dimension maps on to an Anderson model with infinite coordination number. Despite this, this system displays localization which appears counterintuitive. A close observation of the on-site disorder potentials on the Fock lattice reveals a large degree of correlation among them as they are derived from an exponentially smaller number of on-site disorder potentials in real space. This indicates that the correlations between the on-site disorder potentials on a Fock lattice has a strong effect on the localization properties of the corresponding many-body system. This intuition is also consistent with studies of quantum random energy model where the typical mid-spectrum states are ergodic and the on-site potentials in Fock space are completely uncorrelated. In this work we perform a systematic quantitative exploration of the nature of correlations of the Fock space potential required for localization. We study different functional variations of the disorder correlation in Fock lattice by analyzing the eigenspectrum obtained through exact diagonalization. Without changing the typical strength of the on-site disorder potential in Fock lattice we show that changing the correlation strength can induce thermalization or localization in systems. From among the various forms of correlations we study, we find that only the linear variation of correlations with Hamming distance in Fock space is able to drive a thermal-MBL phase transition where the transition is driven by the correlation strength. Systems with the other forms of correlations we study are found to be ergodic.

We study quantum information scrambling, specifically the growth of Heisenberg operators, in large disordered spin chains using matrix product operator dynamics to scan across the thermalization-localization quantum phase transition. We observe ballistic operator growth for weak disorder, and a sharp transition to a phase with sub-ballistic operator spreading. The critical disorder strength for the ballistic to sub-ballistic transition is well below the many body localization phase transition, as determined from finite size scaling of energy eigenstate entanglement entropy in small chains. In contrast, we find that the operator dynamics is not very sensitive to the actual eigenstate localization transition. These data are discussed in the context of a universal form for the growing operator shape and substantiated with a simple phenomenological model of rare regions. arXiv:1807.06086v1 [cond-mat.str-el]

This paper investigates the temperature dependence of quantum information scrambling in local systems with an energy gap, m, above the ground state. We study the speed and shape of growing Heisenberg operators as quantified by out-of-time-order correlators, with particular attention paid to so-called contour dependence, i.e. dependence on the way operators are distributed around the thermal circle. We report large scale tensor network numerics on a gapped chaotic spin chain down to temperatures comparable to the gap which show that the speed of operator growth is strongly contour dependent. The numerics also show a characteristic broadening of the operator wavefront at finite temperature T . To study the behavior at temperatures much below the gap, we perform a perturbative calculation in the paramagnetic phase of a 2+1D O(N ) non-linear sigma model, which is analytically tractable at large N . Using the ladder diagram technique, we find that operators spread at a speed T /m at low temperatures, T m. In contrast to the numerical findings of spin chain, the large N computation is insensitive to the contour dependence and does not show broadening of operator front. We discuss these results in the context of a recently proposed state-dependent bound on scrambling.

No abstract