Slow transport and bound states for spinless fermions with long-range Coulomb interactions on one-dimensional lattices

TL;DR

This paper investigates how long-range Coulomb interactions affect transport and relaxation in one-dimensional spinless fermions, revealing a transition from diffusive to subdiffusive behavior and the formation of stable clusters leading to many-body localization-like phases.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of slow bound states and clusters in long-range interacting fermions, providing numerical and analytical evidence for a transition to an MBL-like phase at large couplings.

Findings

Transport slows down with increasing coupling V.

Transition from diffusive to subdiffusive transport occurs.

Stable clusters of particles form, leading to MBL-like behavior.

Abstract

We study transport and relaxation of spinless fermions with long-range Coulomb interactions at high temperatures through numerical simulations of out-of-equilibrium dynamics. We find that the transport and relaxation are continuously slowing down for increasing coupling $V$, and that there is a transition in the type of transport. For intermediate couplings, the system exhibits normal diffusive transport but the time scale for the onset of that is long. For large couplings, it exhibits subdiffusive transport, while at the same time the relaxation time diverges exponentially with system lengths, featuring an MBL-like phase. We attribute the slow transport to formation of slow bound states and stable clusters of particles. For few-particle systems we prove existence, visualize the slowness and analyze collision properties of the bound states. For many particles at high densities there should be a hierarchy of clusters of particles on many different length scales. We argue that at large couplings the average maximal size of the stable clusters should scale linearly with the length of the lattice, which is in accordance with the MBL-like behavior.