Long-range level correlations in quantum systems with finite Hilbert space dimension

Many-body localization in the age of classical computing. REPORTS ON PROGRESS IN PHYSICS. PHYSICAL SOCIETY (GREAT BRITAIN) 2025;88:026502. [PMID: 39591655 DOI: 10.1088/1361-6633/ad9756] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0]

Statistical mechanics provides a framework for describing the physics of large, complex many-body systems using only a few macroscopic parameters to determine the state of the system. For isolated quantum many-body systems, such a description is achieved via the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), which links thermalization, ergodicity and quantum chaotic behavior. However, tendency towards thermalization is not observed at finite system sizes and evolution times in a robust many-body localization (MBL) regime found numerically and experimentally in the dynamics of interacting many-body systems at strong disorder. Although the phenomenology of the MBL regime is well-established, the central question remains unanswered: under what conditions does the MBLregimegive rise to an MBLphase, in which the thermalization does not occur even in theasymptoticlimit of infinite system size and evolution time? This review focuses on recent numerical investigations aiming to clarify the status of the MBL phase, and it establishes the critical open questions about the dynamics of disordered many-body systems. The last decades of research have brought an unprecedented new variety of tools and indicators to study the breakdown of ergodicity, ranging from spectral and wave function measures, matrix elements of observables, through quantities probing unitary quantum dynamics, to transport and quantum information measures. We give a comprehensive overview of these approaches and attempt to provide a unified understanding of their main features. We emphasize general trends towards ergodicity with increasing length and time scales, which exclude naive single-parameter scaling hypothesis, necessitate the use of more refined scaling procedures, and prevent unambiguous extrapolations of numerical results to the asymptotic limit. Providing a concise description of numerical methods for studying ETH and MBL, we explore various approaches to tackle the question of the MBL phase. Persistent finite size drifts towards ergodicity consistently emerge in quantities derived from eigenvalues and eigenvectors of disordered many-body systems. The drifts are related to continuous inching towards ergodicity and non-vanishing transport observed in the dynamics of many-body systems, even at strong disorder. These phenomena impede the understanding of microscopic processes at the ETH-MBL crossover. Nevertheless, the abrupt slowdown of dynamics with increasing disorder strength provides premises suggesting the proximity of the MBL phase. This review concludes that the questions about thermalization and its failure in disordered many-body systems remain a captivating area open for further explorations.

Statistics of phase space localization measures and quantum chaos in the kicked top model

Quantum chaos plays a significant role in understanding several important questions of recent theoretical and experimental studies. Here, by focusing on the localization properties of eigenstates in phase space (by means of Husimi functions), we explore the characterizations of quantum chaos using the statistics of the localization measures, that is the inverse participation ratio and the Wehrl entropy. We consider the paradigmatic kicked top model, which shows a transition to chaos with increasing the kicking strength. We demonstrate that the distributions of the localization measures exhibit a drastic change as the system undergoes the crossover from integrability to chaos. We also show how to identify the signatures of quantum chaos from the central moments of the distributions of localization measures. Moreover, we find that the localization measures in the fully chaotic regime apparently universally exhibit the beta distribution, in agreement with previous studies in the billiard systems and the Dicke model. Our results contribute to a further understanding of quantum chaos and shed light on the usefulness of the statistics of phase space localization measures in diagnosing the presence of quantum chaos, as well as the localization properties of eigenstates in quantum chaotic systems.

Entropy and temperature in finite isolated quantum systems

We investigate how the temperature calculated from the microcanonical entropy compares with the canonical temperature for finite isolated quantum systems. We concentrate on systems with sizes that make them accessible to numerical exact diagonalization. We thus characterize the deviations from ensemble equivalence at finite sizes. We describe multiple ways to compute the microcanonical entropy and present numerical results for the entropy and temperature computed in these various ways. We show that using an energy window whose width has a particular energy dependence results in a temperature with minimal deviations from the canonical temperature.

Nonergodic extended states in the β ensemble

Matrix models showing a chaotic-integrable transition in the spectral statistics are important for understanding many-body localization (MBL) in physical systems. One such example is the β ensemble, known for its structural simplicity. However, eigenvector properties of the β ensemble remain largely unexplored, despite energy level correlations being thoroughly studied. In this work we numerically study the eigenvector properties of the β ensemble and find that the Anderson transition occurs at γ=1 and ergodicity breaks down at γ=0 if we express the repulsion parameter as β=N^{-γ}. Thus other than the Rosenzweig-Porter ensemble (RPE), the β ensemble is another example where nonergodic extended (NEE) states are observed over a finite interval of parameter values (0<γ<1). We find that the chaotic-integrable transition coincides with the breaking of ergodicity in the β ensemble but with the localization transition in the RPE or the 1D disordered spin-1/2 Heisenberg model. As a result, the dynamical timescales in the NEE regime of the β ensemble behave differently than the latter models.