Excited-state fidelity as a signal for the many-body localization transition in a disordered Ising chain

In this work, we use exact matrix diagonalization to explore the many-body localization (MBL) transitions in quantum Ising chains with disordered nearest-neighbour couplings, disordered next-nearest-neighbour couplings and disordered external fields. It is demonstrated that the fidelity can be used...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Taotao Hu, Kang Xue, Xiaodan Li, Yan Zhang, Hang Ren
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Publishing Group 2017-04-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-00660-4
Description
Summary:In this work, we use exact matrix diagonalization to explore the many-body localization (MBL) transitions in quantum Ising chains with disordered nearest-neighbour couplings, disordered next-nearest-neighbour couplings and disordered external fields. It is demonstrated that the fidelity can be used to characterize the interaction-driven MBL transition in this closed spin system in a manner that is consistent with previous analytical and numerical results. We compute the fidelity for high-energy many-body eigenstates, namely, the excited-state fidelity. It is demonstrated that disordered nearest-neighbour couplings, disordered next-nearest-neighbour couplings and disordered external fields each have different effects on the MBL transition. Furthermore, we investigate the MBL transition of a quantum Ising chain with both disordered nearest-neighbour couplings and disordered next-nearest-neighbour couplings to see how these two types of disordered couplings drive the occurrence of the MBL transition.
ISSN:2045-2322