Escaping many-body localization in an exact eigenstate

Abstract

Isolated quantum systems typically follow the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, but there are exceptions, such as many-body localized (MBL) systems and quantum many-body scars. Here, we present the study of a weak violation of MBL due to a special state embedded in a spectrum of MBL states. The special state is not MBL since it displays logarithmic scaling of the entanglement entropy and of the bipartite fluctuations of particle number with subsystem size. In contrast, the bulk of the spectrum becomes MBL as disorder is introduced. We establish this by studying the entropy as a function of disorder strength and by observing that the level spacing statistics undergoes a transition from Wigner-Dyson to Poisson statistics as the disorder strength is increased.

8 pages, 7 figures, accepted version

References in corpus (8)

• Many-Body Physics with Ultracold Gases
• Many body localization and thermalization in quantum statistical mechanics
• Localization of interacting fermions at high temperature
• Many-body localization edge in the random-field Heisenberg chain
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• Universal Freezing Transitions of Dipole-Conserving Chains
• Delocalization in a partially disordered interacting many-body system