• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.94.144203
• Corpus ID: 118749386

Many-body localization beyond eigenstates in all dimensions

@article{Chandran2016ManybodyLB,
  title={Many-body localization beyond eigenstates in all dimensions},
  author={Anushya Chandran and Arijeet Pal and Chris R. Laumann and Antonello Scardicchio},
  journal={Physical Review B},
  year={2016},
  volume={94},
  pages={144203}
}

• A. Chandran, A. Pal, +1 author A. Scardicchio
• Published 2 May 2016
• Physics
• Physical Review B

Isolated quantum systems with quenched randomness exhibit many-body localization (MBL), wherein they do not reach local thermal equilibrium even when highly excited above their ground states. It is widely believed that individual eigenstates capture this breakdown of thermalization at finite size. We show that this belief is false in general and that a MBL system can exhibit the eigenstate properties of a thermalizing system. We propose that localized approximately conserved operators $({\mathrm{l}}^{*}\text{-bits})$ underlie localization in such systems. In dimensions $dg1$, we further argue that the existing MBL phenomenology is unstable to boundary effects and gives way to ${\mathrm{l}}^{*}\text{-bits}$. Physical consequences of ${\mathrm{l}}^{*}\text{-bits}$ include the possibility of an eigenstate phase transition within the MBL phase unrelated to the dynamical transition in $d=1$ and thermal eigenstates at all parameters in $dg1$. Near-term experiments in ultracold atomic systems and numerics can probe the dynamics generated by boundary layers and emergence of ${\mathrm{l}}^{*}\text{-bits}$.