2016/09/05 by Xiaopeng Li, Dong-Ling Deng, Yang-Le Wu +1
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Classical mechanics #Degrees of freedom (physics and chemistry) #Eigenvalues and eigenvectors #Entropy (arrow of time) #Fermion #Mathematics #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Physics #Quantum #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum entanglement #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Randomness #Statistical physics #Statistics #Thermalisation #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.quant-gas #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.95.020201
published as Phys. Rev. B 95, 020201 (2017) · 5+4 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2016/09/05 · openalex publication_date 2017/01/24 · arxiv updated 2017/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study one-dimensional spinless fermions with random interactions, but without any on-site disorder. We find that random interactions generically stabilize a many-body localized phase, in spite of the completely extended single-particle degrees of freedom. In the large randomness limit, we construct ``bubble-neck'' eigenstates having a universal area-law entanglement entropy on average, with the number of volume-law states being exponentially suppressed. We argue that this statistical localization is beyond the phenomenological local-integrals-of-motion description of many-body localization. With exact diagonalization, we confirm the robustness of the many-body localized phase at finite randomness by investigating eigenstate properties such as level statistics, entanglement/participation entropies, and nonergodic quantum dynamics. At weak random interactions, the system develops a thermalization transition when the single-particle hopping becomes dominant.