Localization on certain graphs with strongly correlated disorder

Journal article

Many-body localization in interacting quantum systems can be cast as a disordered hopping problem on the underlying Fock-space graph. A crucial feature of the effective Fock-space disorder is that the Fock-space site energies are strongly correlated—maximally so for sites separated by a finite distance on the graph. Motivated by this, and to understand the effect of such correlations more fundamentally, we study Anderson localization on Cayley trees and random regular graphs, with maximally correlated disorder. Since such correlations suppress short distance fluctuations in the disorder potential, one might naively suppose they disfavor localization. We find however that there exists an Anderson transition, and indeed that localization is more robust in the sense that the critical disorder scales with graph connectivity K as √K, in marked contrast to KlnK in the uncorrelated case. This scaling is argued to be intimately connected to the stability of many-body localization. Our analysis centers on an exact recursive formulation for the local propagators as well as a self-consistent mean-field theory; with results corroborated using exact diagonalization.

Authors: Roy, S; Logan, DE

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Journal: Physical Review Letters
• Volume: 125
• Issue: 25
• Article number: 250402
• Publication date: 2020-12-15
• Acceptance date: 2020-11-17
• DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.125.250402
• EISSN: 1079-7114
• ISSN: 0031-9007
• Pmid: 33416356
• Language: English
• Keywords: FFR