Localisation on certain graphs with strongly correlated disorder

TL;DR

This paper investigates Anderson localisation on graphs with maximally correlated disorder, revealing a more robust localisation transition with critical disorder scaling as the square root of connectivity, which has implications for many-body localisation.

Contribution

It introduces a study of Anderson localisation with maximally correlated disorder on Cayley trees and random regular graphs, highlighting a distinct scaling of the critical disorder.

Findings

Localization is more robust with correlated disorder.

Critical disorder scales as √K, unlike uncorrelated case.

Results are supported by exact diagonalisation.

Abstract

Many-body localisation in interacting quantum systems can be cast as a disordered hopping problem on the underlying Fock-space graph. A crucial feature of the effective Fock-space disorder is that the Fock-space site energies are strongly correlated -- maximally so for sites separated by a finite distance on the graph. Motivated by this, and to understand the effect of such correlations more fundamentally, we study Anderson localisation on Cayley trees and random regular graphs, with maximally correlated disorder. Since such correlations suppress short distance fluctuations in the disorder potential, one might naively suppose they disfavour localisation. We find however that there exists an Anderson transition, and indeed that localisation is more robust in the sense that the critical disorder scales with graph connectivity $K$ as $\sqrt{K}$, in marked contrast to $K\ln K$ in the uncorrelated case. This scaling is argued to be intimately connected to the stability of many-body localisation. Our analysis centres on an exact recursive formulation for the local propagators as well as a self-consistent mean-field theory; with results corroborated using exact diagonalisation.