• DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.87.134202
• Corpus ID: 6987707

Many-body localization in a quasiperiodic system

@article{Iyer2013ManybodyLI,
  title={Many-body localization in a quasiperiodic system},
  author={Shankar Iyer and Vadim Oganesyan and Gil Refael and David A. Huse},
  journal={Physical Review B},
  year={2013},
  volume={87},
  pages={134202}
}

• Shankar Iyer, V. Oganesyan, +1 author D. Huse
• Published 17 December 2012
• Physics
• Physical Review B

Recent theoretical and numerical evidence suggests that localization can survive in disordered many-body systems with very high energy density, provided that interactions are sufficiently weak. Stronger interactions can destroy localization, leading to a so-called many-body localization transition. This dynamical phase transition is relevant to questions of thermalization in extended quantum systems far from the zero-temperature limit. It separates a many-body localized phase, in which localization prevents transport and thermalization, from a conducting ("ergodic") phase in which the usual assumptions of quantum statistical mechanics hold. Here, we present numerical evidence that many-body localization also occurs in models without disorder but rather a quasiperiodic potential. In one dimension, these systems already have a single-particle localization transition, and we show that this transition becomes a many-body localization transition upon the introduction of interactions. We also comment on possible relevance of our results to experimental studies of many-body dynamics of cold atoms and non-linear light in quasiperiodic potentials.