Integrals of motion for one-dimensional Anderson localized systems

TL;DR

This paper constructs explicit integrals of motion for one-dimensional Anderson localized systems, demonstrating their existence in the localized phase and providing insights into the structure of disordered quantum systems.

Contribution

The authors develop a method to explicitly construct integrals of motion for Anderson localized models using a power series in the hopping parameter, inspired by Type-1 Hamiltonians.

Findings

Integrals of motion are well-defined in the localized phase.

The construction applies to models with infinite-range hopping.

Integrals of motion break down in the extended phase.

Abstract

Anderson localization is known to be inevitable in one dimension for generic disordered models. Since localization leads to Poissonian energy level statistics, we ask if localized systems possess "additional" integrals of motion as well, so as to enhance the analogy with quantum integrable systems. We answer this in the affirmative in the present work. We construct a set of nontrivial integrals of motion for Anderson localized models, in terms of the original creation and annihilation operators. These are found as a power series in the hopping parameter. The recently found Type-1 Hamiltonians, which are known to be quantum integrable in a precise sense, motivate our construction. We note that these models can be viewed as disordered electron models with infinite-range hopping, where a similar series truncates at the linear order. We show that despite the infinite range hopping, all states but one are localized. We also study the conservation laws for the disorder free Aubry-Andre model, where the states are either localized or extended, depending on the strength of a coupling constant. We formulate a specific procedure for averaging over disorder, in order to examine the convergence of the power series. Using this procedure in the Aubry-Andre model, we show that integrals of motion given by our construction are well-defined in localized phase, but not so in the extended phase. Finally, we also obtain the integrals of motion for a model with interactions to lowest order in the interaction.