Entanglement and thermodynamic entropy in a clean many-body-localized system

TL;DR

This study investigates the relationship between entanglement entropy and thermodynamic entropy across different phases in a many-body system, revealing that MBL phases violate ETH and show distinct entropy behaviors compared to ergodic phases.

Contribution

It introduces a diagnostic test comparing entanglement and thermodynamic entropy to distinguish phases in a clean many-body system, highlighting differences in entropy behavior in MBL phases.

Findings

In the ergodic phase, entanglement entropy matches thermodynamic entropy.

In MBL phases, entanglement entropy fluctuates and differs from thermodynamic entropy.

Quench dynamics support ETH validity in ergodic phase and its violation in MBL phase.

Abstract

Whether or not the thermodynamic entropy is equal to the entanglement entropy of an eigenstate, is of fundamental interest, and is closely related to the `Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH)'. However, this has never been exploited as a diagnostic tool in many-body localized systems. In this work, we perform this diagnostic test on a clean interacting system (subjected to a static electric field) that exhibits three distinct phases: integrable, non-integrable ergodic and non-integrable many-body-localized (MBL). We find that in the non-integrable ergodic phase, the equivalence between the thermodynamic entropy and the entanglement entropy of individual eigenstates, holds. In sharp contrast, in the integrable and non-integrable MBL phases, the entanglement entropy shows large eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations, and differs from the thermodynamic entropy. Thus the non-integrable MBL phase violates ETH similar to an integrable system; however, a key difference is that the magnitude of the entanglement entropy in the MBL phase is significantly smaller than in the integrable phase, where the entanglement entropy is of the same order of magnitude as in the non-integrable phase, but with a lot of eigenstate-to-eigenstate fluctuations. Quench dynamics from an initial CDW state independently supports the validity of the ETH in the ergodic phase and its violation in the MBL phase.