Signatures of many-body localization of quasiparticles in a flat band superconductor

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that many-body localization of quasiparticles can coexist with superfluidity in flat band superconductors, revealing long-term memory effects and local integrals of motion in such systems.

Contribution

It constructs exact eigenstates showing coexistence of localized quasiparticles and mobile Cooper pairs, advancing understanding of localization in flat band superconductors.

Findings

Localized unpaired particles retain memory of initial states for long times

Exact eigenstates exhibit coexistence of localization and superfluidity

Evidence of local integrals of motion in the projected Hamiltonian

Abstract

We construct a class of exact eigenstates of the Hamiltonian obtained by projecting the Hubbard interaction term onto the flat band subspace of a generic lattice model. These exact eigenstates are many body states in which an arbitrary number of localized fermionic particles coexist with a sea of mobile Cooper pairs with zero momentum. By considering the dice lattice as an example, we provide evidence that these exact eigenstates are in fact manifestation of local integrals of motions of the projected Hamiltonian. In particular the spin and particle densities retain memory of the initial state for a very long time, if localized unpaired particles are present at the beginning of the time evolution. This shows that many-body localization of quasiparticles and superfluidity can coexist even in generic two-dimensional lattice models with flat bands, for which it is not known how to construct local conserved quantities. Our results open new perspectives on the old condensed matter problem of the interplay between superconductivity and localization.