2018/08/31 by Evert van Nieuwenburg, Evert P. L. van Nieuwenburg, Yuval Baum +1 · 4 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Condensed matter physics #Fermion #Hamiltonian (control theory) #Limit (mathematics) #Mathematical analysis #Mathematics #Model Reduction and Neural Networks #Physics #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Spins #Statistical physics #Thermalisation #Work (physics) #cond-mat.dis-nn
paper · pdf · doi:10.1073/pnas.1819316116
published as PNAS 2019 · 7 (main) + 3 (appendices) pages, 4 + 5 figures; Code and data available online
arxiv created 2019/03/14 · openalex publication_date 2019/04/24 · arxiv updated 2019/04/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
In this work we demonstrate that nonrandom mechanisms that lead to single-particle localization may also lead to many-body localization, even in the absence of disorder. In particular, we consider interacting spins and fermions in the presence of a linear potential. In the noninteracting limit, these models show the well-known Wannier-Stark localization. We analyze the fate of this localization in the presence of interactions. Remarkably, we find that beyond a critical value of the potential gradient these models exhibit nonergodic behavior as indicated by their spectral and dynamical properties. These models, therefore, constitute a class of generic nonrandom models that fail to thermalize. As such, they suggest new directions for experimentally exploring and understanding the phenomena of many-body localization. We supplement our work by showing that by using machine-learning techniques the level statistics of a system may be calculated without generating and diagonalizing the Hamiltonian, which allows a generation of large statistics.