In one dimension, noninteracting particles can undergo a localization-delocalization transition in a quasiperiodic potential. Recent studies have suggested that this transition transforms into a Many-Body Localization (MBL) transition upon the introduction of interactions. It has also been shown that mobility edges can appear in the single particle spectrum for certain types of quasiperiodic potentials. Here we investigate the effect of interactions in two models with such mobility edges. Employing the technique of exact diagonalization for finite-sized systems, we calculate the level spacing distribution, time evolution of entanglement entropy, optical conductivity and return probability to detect MBL. We find that MBL does indeed occur in one of the two models we study but the entanglement appears to grow faster than logarithmically with time unlike in other MBL systems.

We study the time evolution of the entanglement entropy in bosonic systems with timeindependent, or time-periodic, Hamiltonians. In the first part, we focus on quadratic Hamiltonians and Gaussian initial states. We show that all quadratic Hamiltonians can be decomposed into three parts: (a) unstable, (b) stable, and (c) metastable. If present, each part contributes in a characteristic way to the time-dependence of the entanglement entropy: (a) linear production, (b) bounded oscillations, and (c) logarithmic production. In the second part, we use numerical calculations to go beyond Gaussian states and quadratic Hamiltonians. We provide numerical evidence for the conjecture that entanglement production through quadratic Hamiltonians has the same asymptotic behavior for non-Gaussian initial states as for Gaussian ones. Moreover, even for non-quadratic Hamiltonians, we find a similar behavior at intermediate times. Our results are of relevance to understanding entanglement production for quantum fields in dynamical backgrounds and ultracold atoms in optical lattices. arXiv:1710.04279v2 [hep-th]

Anderson localization is known to be inevitable in one-dimension for generic disordered models. Since localization leads to Poissonian energy level statistics, we ask if localized systems possess 'additional' integrals of motion as well, so as to enhance the analogy with quantum integrable systems. We answer this in the affirmative in the present work. We construct a set of nontrivial integrals of motion for Anderson localized models, in terms of the original creation and annihilation operators. These are found as a power series in the hopping parameter. The recently found Type-1 Hamiltonians, which are known to be quantum integrable in a precise sense, motivate our construction. We note that these models can be viewed as disordered electron models with infinite-range hopping, where a similar series truncates at the linear order. We show that despite the infinite range hopping, all states but one are localized. We also study the conservation laws for the disorder free Aubry-Andre model, where the states are either localized or extended, depending on the strength of a coupling constant. We formulate a specific procedure for averaging over disorder, in order to examine the convergence of the power series. Using this procedure in the Aubry-Andre model, we show that integrals of motion given by our construction are well-defined in localized phase, but not so in the extended phase. Finally, we also obtain the integrals of motion for a model with interactions to lowest order in the interaction.

We review the physics of many-body localization in models with incommensurate potentials. In particular, we consider one-dimensional quasiperiodic models with single-particle mobility edges. A conventional perspective suggests that delocalized states act as a thermalizing bath for the localized states in the presence of of interactions. However, contrary to this intuition there is evidence that such systems can display non-ergodicity. This is in part due to the fact that the delocalized states do not have any kind of protection due to symmetry or topology and are thus susceptible to localization. A study of such incommensurate models, in the non-interacting limit, shows that they admit extended, partially extended, and fully localized many-body states. Non-interacting incommensurate models cannot thermalize dynamically and remain localized upon the introduction of interactions. In particular, for a certain range of energy, the system can host a non-ergodic extended (i.e. metallic) phase in which the energy eigenstates violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) but the entanglement entropy obeys volume-law scaling. The level statistics and entanglement growth also indicate the lack of ergodicity in these models. The phenomenon of localization and nonergodicity in a system with interactions despite the presence of single-particle delocalized states is closely related to the so-called "many-body proximity effect" and can also be observed in models with disorder coupled to systems with delocalized degrees of freedom. Many-body localization in systems with incommensurate potentials (without singleparticle mobility edges) have been realized experimentally, and we show how this can be modified to study the the effects of such mobility edges. Demonstrating the failure of thermalization in the presence of a single-particle mobility edge in the thermodynamic limit would indicate a more robust violation of the ETH.

The entanglement evolution after a quantum quench became one of the tools to distinguish integrable versus chaotic (non-integrable) quantum many-body dynamics. Following this line of thoughts, here we propose that the revivals in the entanglement entropy provide a finite-size diagnostic benchmark for the purpose. Indeed, integrable models display periodic revivals manifested in a dip in the block entanglement entropy in a finite system. On the other hand, in chaotic systems, initial correlations get dispersed in the global degrees of freedom (information scrambling) and such a dip is suppressed. We show that while for integrable systems the height of the dip of the entanglement of an interval of fixed length decays as a power law with the total system size, upon breaking integrability a much faster decay is observed, signalling strong scrambling. Our results are checked by exact numerical techniques in free-fermion and free-boson theories, and by time-dependent density matrix renormalisation group in interacting integrable and chaotic models.

Using numerical diagonalization we study the crossover among different random matrix ensembles (Poissonian, Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE), Gaussian unitary ensemble (GUE) and Gaussian symplectic ensemble (GSE)) realized in two different microscopic models. The specific diagnostic tool used to study the crossovers is the level spacing distribution. The first model is a one-dimensional lattice model of interacting hard-core bosons (or equivalently spin 1/2 objects) and the other a higher dimensional model of non-interacting particles with disorder and spin-orbit coupling. We find that the perturbation causing the crossover among the different ensembles scales to zero with system size as a power law with an exponent that depends on the ensembles between which the crossover takes place. This exponent is independent of microscopic details of the perturbation. We also find that the crossover from the Poissonian ensemble to the other three is dominated by the Poissonian to GOE crossover which introduces level repulsion while the crossover from GOE to GUE or GOE to GSE associated with symmetry breaking introduces a subdominant contribution. We also conjecture that the exponent is dependent on whether the system contains interactions among the elementary degrees of freedom or not and is independent of the dimensionality of the system.

We study models of interacting fermions in one dimension to investigate the crossover from integrability to non-integrability, i.e., quantum chaos, as a function of system size. Using exact diagonalization of finite-sized systems, we study this crossover by obtaining the energy level statistics and Drude weight associated with transport. Our results reinforce the idea that for system size L → ∞ non-integrability sets in for an arbitrarily small integrability-breaking perturbation. The crossover value of the perturbation scales as a power law ∼ L −3 when the integrable system is gapless and the scaling appears to be robust to microscopic details and the precise form of the perturbation. We conjecture that the exponent in the power law is characteristic of the random matrix ensemble describing the non-integrable system. For systems with a gap, the crossover scaling appears to be faster than a power law. How isolated quantum systems thermalize, hitherto investigated theoretically in a few special cases [1][2][3], is now the subject of active experimental study thanks to the advent of cold-atom systems [4,5]. Recall that in isolated classical systems that thermalize, a phase space trajectory samples all possible microstates at a given energy spending equal amounts of time in each, yielding the microcanonical prescription. On the other hand, for a system which does not thermalize, the trajectory typically follows regular, not chaotic, orbits constrained by conservation laws and samples only a low-dimensional subspace. This notion of thermalization underpins the Fermi-PastaUlam problem of a classical system of masses connected by springs [6]. For harmonic springs the system does not thermalize and, even upon the introduction of anharmonicity, thermalization occurs only above an energy threshold which, however, scales to zero with increasing system size, as a power-law characterizing the nature of anharmonicity [7]. Signatures of lack of thermalization in classical systems can also be seen in transport [8] (but note that singular size-dependence of thermal conductivity is distinct from a failure to thermalize [9]).In this paper we investigate analogous issues for quantum systems. Later in the paper we compare our study to the related work of Rabson et al. [10]. As quantum mechanics lacks a notion of phase space, we identify thermalization with non-integrability, i.e., quantum chaos, a now-standard prescription, and use the corresponding diagnostic tools. We would like to emphasize that while the integrable systems we study a) are exactly solvable, b) have an infinity of conservation laws in the thermodynamic limit and c) display Poissonian level-spacing statistics it is perhaps only the last one that is important to prevent thermalization: localized phases of disordered systems lacking properties a) and b) have been argued to not thermalize [11].Our main result is that the characteristic value of control parameter at which significant non-integrability is seen scales to zero with increasing system size as in the classi...

Non-interacting fermions in one dimension can undergo a localization-delocalization transition in the presence of a quasi-periodic potential as a function of that potential. In the presence of interactions, this transition transforms into a Many-Body Localization (MBL) transition. Recent studies have suggested that this type of transition can also occur in models with quasi-periodic potentials that possess single particle mobility edges. Two such models were studied in PRL 115,230401(2015) but only one was found to exhibit an MBL transition in the presence of interactions while the other one did not. In this work we investigate the occurrence of MBL in the presence of weak interactions in five different models with single particle mobility edges in one dimension with a view to obtaining a criterion for the same. We find that not all such models undergo a thermal-MBL phase transition in presence of weak interactions. We propose a criterion to determine whether MBL is likely to occur in presence of interaction based only on the properties of the non-interacting models. The relevant quantity ǫ is a measure of how localized the localized states are relative to how delocalized the delocalized states are in the non-interacting model. We also study various other features of the non-interacting models such as the divergence of the localization length at the mobility edge and the presence or absence of 'ergodicity' and localization in their many-body eigenstates. However, we find that these features cannot be used to predict the occurrence of MBL upon the introduction of weak interactions.