Many Body Localization Transition in the strong disorder limit : entanglement entropy from the statistics of rare extensive resonances

TL;DR

This paper investigates the many-body localization transition in the strong disorder limit, analyzing entanglement entropy growth, resonance statistics, and critical exponents to understand the phase transition's nature.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the entanglement entropy scaling and resonance statistics at the MBL transition in the strong disorder regime, revealing a range of entropy growth exponents and a correlation length exponent of 1.

Findings

Entanglement entropy can grow with an exponent between 0 and 1 at criticality.

The entanglement spectrum exhibits strong multifractality.

Near criticality, the correlation length exponent is approximately 1.

Abstract

The space of one-dimensional disordered interacting quantum models displaying a Many-Body-Localization Transition seems sufficiently rich to produce critical points with level statistics interpolating continuously between the Poisson statistics of the Localized phase and the Wigner-Dyson statistics of the Delocalized Phase. In this paper, we consider the strong disorder limit of the MBL transition, where the critical level statistics is close to the Poisson statistics. We analyse a one-dimensional quantum spin model, in order to determine the statistical properties of the rare extensive resonances that are needed to destabilize the MBL phase. At criticality, we find that the entanglement entropy can grow with an exponent $0<\alpha < 1$ anywhere between the area law $\alpha=0$ and the volume law $\alpha=1$, as a function of the resonances properties, while the entanglement spectrum follows the strong multifractality statistics. In the MBL phase near criticality, we obtain the simple value $\nu=1$ for the correlation length exponent. Independently of the strong disorder limit, we explain why for the Many-Body-Localization transition concerning individual eigenstates, the correlation length exponent $\nu$ is not constrained by the usual Harris inequality $\nu \geq 2/d$, so that there is no theoretical inconsistency with the best numerical measure $\nu = 0.8 (3)$ obtained by D. J. Luitz, N. Laflorencie and F. Alet, Phys. Rev. B 91, 081103 (2015).