Interplay and competition between disorder and flat band in an interacting Creutz ladder

TL;DR

This paper explores how disorder and interactions influence localization and thermalization in the Creutz ladder, revealing a complex phase diagram with competing phases and unconventional dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the interplay between disorder and flat-band effects in an interacting Creutz ladder, including phase diagrams and dynamical properties.

Findings

Disorder induces a transition from flat-band localization to thermal phase.

Increasing disorder leads to a transition from thermal to many-body localized phase.

Finite-filling cases show similar competition effects with preserved initial-state information.

Abstract

We clarify the interplay and competition between disorder and flat band in the Creutz ladder with inter-particle interactions focusing on the system's dynamics. Without disorder, the Creutz ladder exhibits flat-band many-body localization (FMBL). In this work, we find that disorder generates drastic effects on the system, i.e., addition of it induces a thermal phase first and further increase of it leads the system to the conventional many-body-localized (MBL) phase. The competition gives novel localization properties and unconventional quench dynamics to the system. We first draw the global sketch of the localization phase diagram by focusing on the two-particle system. The thermal phase intrudes between the FMBL and MBL phases, the regime of which depends on the strength of disorder and interactions. Based on the two-particle phase diagram and the properties of the quench dynamics, we further investigate finite-filling cases in detail. At finite-filling fractions, we again find that the interplay/competition between the interactions and disorder in the original flat-band Creutz ladder induces thermal phase, which separates the FMBL and MBL phases. We also verify that the time evolution of the system coincides with the static phase diagrams. For suitable fillings, the conservation of the initial-state information and low-growth entanglement dynamics are also observed. These properties depend on the strength of disorder and interactions.