The general approach to the critical phase with coupled quasiperiodic chains

TL;DR

This paper introduces a general method to realize the critical phase with multifractal states in coupled quasiperiodic chains, demonstrating its robustness across different couplings and potentials, with potential experimental applications using ultracold atoms.

Contribution

The paper presents a universal approach to generate the critical phase in coupled quasiperiodic chains, expanding understanding and control of multifractal states in disordered systems.

Findings

Critical phase exists in overlapped spectra with inter-chain coupling.

Critical phase emerges due to effective unbounded potential.

Method applicable to continuous models with ultracold atoms.

Abstract

In disordered systems, wave functions in the Schr\"{o}dinger equation may exhibit a transition from the extended phase to the localized phase, in which the states at the boundaries or mobility edges may exhibit multifractality. Meanwhile, the Critical Phase (CP), where all states exhibit multifractal structures, has also attracted much attention in the past decades. However, a generic way to construct the CP on demand still remains elusive. Here, a general approach for this phase is presented using two coupled quasiperiodic chains, where the chains are chosen so that before coupling one of them has extended states while the other one has localized states. We demonstrate the existence of CP in the overlapped spectra in the presence of inter-chain coupling using fractal dimension and minimal scaling index based on multifractal analysis. Then we examine the generality of this physics by changing the forms of inter-chain coupling and quasiperiodic potential, where the CP also emerges in the overlapped spectra. We account for the emergence of this phase as a result of effective unbounded potential, which yields singular continuous spectra and excludes the extended states in the overlapped regimes. Finally, the realization of this CP in the continuous model using ultracold atoms with bichromatic incommensurate optical lattice is also discussed. Due to the tunability of the two chains, this work provides a general approach to realizing the CP in a tunable way. This approach may have wide applications in the experimental detection of CP and can be generalized to much more intriguing physics in the presence of interaction for the many-body CP.