Length scales in the many-body localized phase and their spectral signatures

Abstract

We compute and compare the decay lengths of several correlation functions and effective coupling constants in the many-body localized (MBL) phase. To this end, we consider the distribution of the logarithms of these couplings and correlators: in each case the log-coupling follows a normal distribution with mean and variance that grow linearly with separation. Thus, a localization length is asymptotically sharply defined for each of these quantities. These localization lengths differ numerically from one another, but all of them remain short up to the numerically observed MBL transition, indicating stability of the MBL phase against isolated ergodic inclusions. We also show how these broad distributions may be extracted using interferometric probes such as double electron-electron resonance (DEER) and the statistics of local spin precession frequencies.