Absence of Diffusion in an Interacting System of Spinless Fermions on a One-Dimensional Disordered Lattice

Yevgeny Bar Lev, Guy Cohen, and David R. Reichman
Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 100601 – Published 11 March 2015
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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.

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  • Received 30 July 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.100601

© 2015 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Yevgeny Bar Lev1,*, Guy Cohen1,2, and David R. Reichman1

  • 1Department of Chemistry, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA
  • 2Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, USA

  • *yb2296@columbia.edu

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Vol. 114, Iss. 10 — 13 March 2015

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