Metal-insulator transition in infinitesimally weakly disordered flat bands

Abstract

We study the effect of infinitesimal onsite disorder on d-dimensional all bands flat lattices. The lattices are generated from diagonal Hamiltonians by a sequence of (d + 1) local unitary transformations parametrized by angles ${\theta}_i$. Without loss of generality, we consider the case of two flat bands separated by a finite gap $\Delta$. The perturbed states originating from the flat bands are described by an effective tight binding network with finite on- and off-diagonal disorder strength which depends on the manifold angles ${\theta}_i$. The original infinitesimal onsite disorder strength W is only affecting the overall scale of the effective Hamiltonian. Upon variation of the manifold angles for d = 1 and d = 2 we find that localization persists for any choice of local unitaries, and the localization length can be maximized for specific values of ${\theta}_i$. Instead, in d = 3 we identify a non-perturbative metal-insulator transition upon varying the all bands flat manifold angles.