Many-body localization and thermalization in disordered Hubbard chains

TL;DR

This paper investigates the transition between localized and ergodic phases in disordered Hubbard chains, revealing that ergodicity is robust against weak disorder and highlighting finite size effects in experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of many-body localization in Hubbard chains using exact diagonalization and chaos indicators, emphasizing the robustness of ergodicity.

Findings

Ergodicity remains robust against weak disorder.

Large disorder strength is required for localization.

Finite size effects may obscure localization in experiments.

Abstract

We study the many-body localization transition in one-dimensional Hubbard chains using exact diagonalization and quantum chaos indicators. We also study dynamics in the delocalized (ergodic) and localized phases and discuss thermalization and eigenstate thermalization, or the lack thereof, in such systems. Consistently within the indicators and observables studied, we find that ergodicity is very robust against disorder, namely, even in the presence of weak Hubbard interactions the disorder strength needed for the system to localize is large. We show that this robustness might be hidden by finite size effects in experiments with ultracold fermions.