Thermalization universality-class transition induced by Anderson localization

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

We study the disorder-induced crossover between the two recently discovered thermalization slowing-down universality classes, characterized by long- and short-range coupling, in classical unitary-circuit maps close to integrability. We compute Lyapunov spectra, which display qualitatively distinct features depending on whether the proximity to the integrable limit is short or long range. For sufficiently small nonlinearity, translationally invariant systems fall into the long-range class. Adding disorder to such a system triggers a transition to the short-range class, implying a breaking of this invariance, and in the very limit of vanishing nonlinearity Anderson localization emerges. The crossover from the long- to the short-range class is attained by tuning the localization length ξ from ξ≈N to ξ≪N, where N is the system size. As a consequence, the Lyapunov spectrum becomes exponentially suppressed, depending on the extent to which its translational invariance is destroyed. We expect that this disorder-induced crossover will lead to prethermalized phases and, following quantization, to many-body localization. Published by the American Physical Society 2024