Absence of many-body localization in a continuum

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that many-body localization does not occur in continuum systems due to the unbounded growth of single-particle localization length, leading to persistent delocalization regardless of system dimensionality.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis showing the instability of many-body localization in continuum models, contrasting with tight-binding models.

Findings

Many-body localization is unstable in continuum systems.

The system remains delocalized at all temperatures.

Conductivity decreases faster than Arrhenius law as temperature drops.

Abstract

We show that many-body localization, which exists in tight-binding models, is unstable in a continuum. Irrespective of the dimensionality of the system, many-body localization does not survive the unbounded growth of the single-particle localization length with increasing energy that is characteristic of the continuum limit. The system remains delocalized down to arbitrarily small temperature $T$, although its dynamics slows down as $T$ decreases. Remarkably, the conductivity vanishes with decreasing $T$ faster than in the Arrhenius law. The system can be characterized by an effective $T$-dependent single-particle mobility edge which diverges in the limit of $T\to 0$. Delocalization is driven by interactions between hot electrons above the mobility edge and the "bath" of thermal electrons in the vicinity of the Fermi level.