Eigenstate properties of the disordered Bose-Hubbard chain

TL;DR

This study investigates many-body localization in a disordered one-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model, introducing new entropy-based measures that better identify the phase transition and are experimentally accessible.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel decomposition of entanglement entropy into particle number and configuration components, revealing that particle number entropy primarily determines the MBL transition.

Findings

SN deviation correlates with phase transition point

Low-energy states are predominantly thermalized

High-energy states form bosonic clusters in disorder

Abstract

Many-body localization (MBL) of a disordered interacting boson system in one dimension is studied numerically at the filling faction one-half. The von Neumann entanglement entropy SvN is commonly used to detect the MBL phase transition but remains challenging to be directly measured. Based on the U(1) symmetry from the particle number conservation, SvN can be decomposed into the particle number entropy SN and the configuration entropy SC. In light of the tendency that the eigenstate's SC nears zero in the localized phase, we introduce a quantity describing the deviation of SN from the ideal thermalization distribution; finite-size scaling analysis illustrates that it shares the same phase transition point with SvN but displays the better critical exponents. This observation hints that the phase transition to MBL might largely be determined by SN and its fluctuations. Notably, the recent experiments [A. Lukin et al., Science 364, 256 (2019); J. Leonard et al., Nat. Phys. 19, 481 (2023)] demonstrated that this deviation can potentially be measured through the SN measurement. Furthermore, our investigations reveal that the thermalized states primarily occupy the low-energy section of the spectrum, as indicated by measures of localization length, gap ratio, and energy density distribution. This low-energy spectrum of the Bose model closely resembles the entire spectrum of the Fermi (or spin XXZ) model, accommodating a transition from the thermalized to the localized states. While, owing to the bosonic statistics, the high-energy spectrum of the model allows the formation of distinct clusters of bosons in the random potential background. We analyze the resulting eigenstate properties and briefly summarize the associated dynamics. To distinguish between the phase regions at the low and high energies, a probing quantity based on the structure of SvN is also devised.