Kohn's localisation in disordered fermionic systems with and without interactions

Abstract

Understanding the metal-insulator transition in disordered many-fermion systems, both with and without interactions, is one of the most challenging and consequential problems in condensed matter physics. In this paper we address this issue from the perspective of the modern theory of the insulating state (MTIS), which has already proven to be effective for band and Mott insulators in clean systems. First we consider noninteracting systems with different types of aperiodic external potentials: uncorrelated disorder (one-dimensional Anderson model), deterministic disorder (Aubry-André Hamiltonian and its modification including next-nearest neighbour hopping), and disorder with long-range correlations (self-affine potential). We show how the many-body localisation tensor defined within the MTIS may be used as a powerful probe to discriminate the insulating and the metallic phases, and to locate the transition point. Then we investigate the effect of weak repulsive interactions in the Aubry-André Hamiltonian, a model which describes a recent cold-atoms experiment. By treating the weak interactions within a mean-field approximation we obtain a linear shift of the transition point towards stronger disorder, providing evidence for delocalisation induced by interactions.

Previous final section on 3D noninteracting Anderson model is replaced by study of an interacting Aubry-Andre chain, motivated by recent experiments and to reinforce the narrative. Title changed correspondingly

References in corpus (4)

• Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
• Observation of many-body localization of interacting fermions in a quasi-random optical lattice
• Localization in one dimensional lattices with non-nearest-neighbor hopping: Generalized Anderson and Aubry-André models
• Complete absence of localization in a family of disordered lattices

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• Short-range interactions are irrelevant at the quasiperiodic-driven Luttinger Liquid to Anderson Glass transition
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• Self-duality of One-dimensional Quasicrystals with Spin-Orbit Interaction
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• Disorder averaging in random lattice models with periodic boundary conditions: Application to models with uncorrelated and correlated disorder
• From generating functions to the geometric Binder cumulant