Many-body localization in infinite chains

We investigate the phase transition between an ergodic and a many-body localized phase in infinite anisotropic spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg chains with binary disorder. Starting from the N\'eel state, we analyze the decay of antiferromagnetic order $m_s(t)$ and the growth of entanglement entropy $S_{\...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Enss, Tilman (Author) , Andraschko, Felix (Author) , Sirker, Jesko (Author)
Format: Article (Journal) Chapter/Article
Language:English
Published: 2017
In: Arxiv

Online Access:Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05733
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Author Notes:T. Enss, F. Andraschko, and J. Sirker
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Summary:We investigate the phase transition between an ergodic and a many-body localized phase in infinite anisotropic spin-$1/2$ Heisenberg chains with binary disorder. Starting from the N\'eel state, we analyze the decay of antiferromagnetic order $m_s(t)$ and the growth of entanglement entropy $S_{\textrm{ent}}(t)$ during unitary time evolution. Near the phase transition we find that $m_s(t)$ decays exponentially to its asymptotic value $m_s(\infty)\neq 0$ in the localized phase while the data are consistent with a power-law decay at long times in the ergodic phase. In the localized phase, $m_s(\infty)$ shows an exponential sensitivity on disorder with a critical exponent $\nu\sim 0.9$. The entanglement entropy in the ergodic phase grows subballistically, $S_{\textrm{ent}}(t)\sim t^\alpha$, $\alpha\leq 1$, with $\alpha$ varying continuously as a function of disorder. Exact diagonalizations for small systems, on the other hand, do not show a clear scaling with system size and attempts to determine the phase boundary from these data seem to overestimate the extent of the ergodic phase.
Item Description:Gesehen am 23.11.2017
Physical Description:Online Resource