Transport properties of one-dimensional interacting fermions in aperiodic potentials

TL;DR

This study investigates how interactions influence transport in one-dimensional fermionic systems with aperiodic potentials, revealing an intermediate phase with unique scaling behavior between metallic and insulating states.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the interplay of interactions and aperiodic potentials, identifying an intermediate phase characterized by power-law scaling of charge stiffness.

Findings

Existence of an intermediate phase with distinct transport properties

Power-law scaling of charge stiffness in the intermediate phase

Contrast between localized and metallic phases based on scaling behavior

Abstract

Motivated by the existence of metal-insulator transition in one-dimensional non-interacting fermions in quasiperiodic and pseudorandom potentials, we studied interacting spinless fermion models using exact many-body Lanczos diagonalization techniques. Our main focus was to understand the effect of the fermion-fermion interaction on the transport properties of aperiodic systems. We calculated the ground state energy and the Kohn charge stiffness Dc. Our numerical results indicate that there exists a region in the interaction strength parameter space where the system may behave differently from the metallic and insulating phases. This intermediate phase may be characterized by a power law scaling of the charge stiffness constant in contrast to the localized phase where Dc scales exponentially with the size of the system.