Strongly disordered Anderson insulator chains with generic two-body interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how generic two-body interactions affect ergodicity in strongly disordered Anderson insulator chains, finding that ergodicity can emerge even at high disorder levels when the interaction is a true local perturbation.

Contribution

It demonstrates that ergodicity can arise in strongly disordered Anderson insulators with generic two-body interactions, challenging previous assumptions about localization at high disorder.

Findings

Ergodicity emerges at arbitrary strong disorder with true local perturbations.

Level statistics indicate a transition towards ergodic behavior.

Eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is supported in the studied regime.

Abstract

The random-field spin-1/2 XXZ chains, and the corresponding Anderson insulators of spinless fermions with density-density interaction, have been intensively studied in the context of many-body localization. However, we recently argued [B. Krajewski et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 260601(2022)] that the two-body density-density interaction in these models is not generic since only a small fraction of this interaction represents a true local perturbation to the Anderson insulator. Here we study ergodicity of strongly disordered Anderson insulator chains choosing other forms of the two-body interaction for which the strength of the true perturbation is of the same order of magnitude as the bare two-body interaction. Focusing on the strong interaction regime, numerical results for the level statistics and the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis are consistent with emergence of ergodicity at arbitrary strong disorder.