Absence of diffusion in an interacting system of spinless fermions on a one-dimensional disordered lattice

Yevgeny Bar Lev, Guy Cohen, David R. Reichman

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

265 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study the infinite temperature dynamics of a prototypical one-dimensional system expected to exhibit many-body localization. Using numerically exact methods, we establish the dynamical phase diagram of this system based on the statistics of its eigenvalues and its dynamical behavior. We show that the nonergodic phase is reentrant as a function of the interaction strength, illustrating that localization can be reinforced by sufficiently strong interactions even at infinite temperature. Surprisingly, within the accessible time range, the ergodic phase shows subdiffusive behavior, suggesting that the diffusion coefficient vanishes throughout much of the phase diagram in the thermodynamic limit. Our findings strongly suggest that Wigner-Dyson statistics of eigenvalue spacings may appear in a class of ergodic but subdiffusive systems.

Original languageEnglish
Article number100601
JournalPhysical Review Letters
Volume114
Issue number10
DOIs
StatePublished - 11 Mar 2015
Externally publishedYes

Funding

FundersFunder number
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering1053575
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering

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