Many-body localization landscape

Abstract

We generalize the notion of "localization landscape," introduced by M. Filoche and S. Mayboroda [Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 109, 14761 (2012)] for the single-particle Schrodinger operator, to a wide class of interacting many-body Hamiltonians. The many-body localization landscape (MBLL) is defined on a graph in the Fock space, whose nodes represent the basis vectors in the Fock space and edges correspond to transitions between the nodes connected by the hopping term in the Hamiltonian. It is shown that in analogy to the single-particle case, the inverse MBLL plays the role of an effective potential in the Fock space. We construct a generalized discrete Agmon metric and prove Agmon inequalities and locality theorems on the Fock-state graph to obtain bounds on the exponential decay of the many-body wave-functions in the Fock space. Using the MBLL and the locator expansion, we provide considerable analytical evidence for the existence of many-body localization for a wide-class of lattice models in any physical dimension for at least a part of their Hilbert space. The key to this argument is the observation that in sharp contrast to the conventional locator expansion for the Green's function, the locator expansion for the landscape function contains no resonances. For short-range hopping, which limits the connectivity of the Fock-state graph, the locator series is proven to be convergent and bounded by a simple geometric series. This, in combination with the Agmon inequalities and locality theorems, indicates that localization should survive weak interactions and weak hopping for a subset of states in the Hilbert space, but cannot prove or rule out localization of the other states. We also qualitatively discuss potential breakdown of the locator expansion in the MBLL for long-range hopping and the appearance of a mobility edge in higher-dimensional theories.