2019/09/30 by M Schulz, Maximilian Schulz, Scott R. Taylor +5 · 33 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Distribution (mathematics) #Gaussian #Phase (matter) #Phenomenology (philosophy) #Power law #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Quantum many-body systems #Scaling #Scaling law #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/ab6de0
published in Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment 2020(2), 023107 (Institute of Physics) · Close to published version. 9 pages, 9 figures
openalex created_date 2019/09/26 · openalex publication_date 2020/02/01 · arxiv created 2020/03/06 · arxiv updated 2020/03/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract We study anomalous transport arising in disordered one-dimensional spin chains, specifically focusing on the subdiffusive transport typically found in a phase preceding the many-body localization transition. Different types of transport can be distinguished by the scaling of the average resistance with system’s length. We address the following question: what is the distribution of resistance over different disorder realizations, and how does it differ between transport types? In particular, an often evoked so-called Griffiths picture, that aims to explain slow transport as being due to rare regions of high disorder, would predict that the diverging resistivity is due to fat power-law tails in the resistance distribution. Studying many-particle systems with and without interactions we do not find any clear signs of fat tails. The data is compatible with distributions that decay faster than any power law required by the fat tails scenario. Among the distributions compatible with the data, a simple additivity argument suggests a Gaussian distribution for a fractional power of the resistance.