Role of Fock-space correlations in many-body localization
Thibault Scoquart, I. V. Gornyi, A. D. Mirlin
Abstract
Models of many-body localization (MBL) can be represented as tight-binding models in the many-body Hilbert space (Fock space). We explore the role of correlations between matrix elements of the effective Fock-space Hamiltonians in the scaling of MBL critical disorder ${W}_{c}(n)$ with the size $n$ of the system. For this purpose, we consider five models, which all have the same distributions of diagonal (energy) and off-diagonal (``hopping'') Fock-space matrix elements but different Fock-space correlations. These include quantum-dot (QD) and one-dimensional (1D) MBL models, their modifications (uQD and u1D models) with removed correlations of off-diagonal matrix elements, as well a quantum random energy model (QREM) with no correlations at all. Our numerical results are in full consistency with analytical arguments predicting ${n}^{3/4}{(lnn)}^{\ensuremath{-}1/4}\ensuremath{\lesssim}{W}_{c}\ensuremath{\lesssim}nlnn$ for the scaling of ${W}_{c}(n)$ in the QD model (we find ${W}_{c}\ensuremath{\sim}n$ numerically), ${W}_{c}(n)\ensuremath{\sim}\text{const}$ for the 1D model, ${W}_{c}\ensuremath{\sim}nlnn$ for the uQD and u1D models without off-diagonal correlations, and ${W}_{c}\ensuremath{\sim}{n}^{1/2}lnn$ for QREM. The key difference between the QD and 1D models is in the structure of correlations of many-body energies. Removing off-diagonal Fock-space correlations makes both these models ``maximally chaotic''. Our findings demonstrate that the scaling of ${W}_{c}(n)$ for MBL transitions is governed by a combined effect of Fock-space correlations of diagonal and off-diagonal matrix elements.