Fidelity susceptibility in Gaussian random ensembles

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.

Quantum Chaos and Level Dynamics

We review the application of level dynamics to spectra of quantally chaotic systems. We show that the statistical mechanics approach gives us predictions about level statistics intermediate between integrable and chaotic dynamics. Then we discuss in detail different statistical measures involving level dynamics, such as level avoided-crossing distributions, level slope distributions, or level curvature distributions. We show both the aspects of universality in these distributions and their limitations. We concentrate in some detail on measures imported from the quantum information approach such as the fidelity susceptibility, and more generally, geometric tensor matrix elements. The possible open problems are suggested.

A Physical Measure for Characterizing Crossover from Integrable to Chaotic Quantum Systems

In this paper, a quantity that describes a response of a system's eigenstates to a very small perturbation of physical relevance is studied as a measure for characterizing crossover from integrable to chaotic quantum systems. It is computed from the distribution of very small, rescaled components of perturbed eigenfunctions on the unperturbed basis. Physically, it gives a relative measure to prohibition of level transitions induced by the perturbation. Making use of this measure, numerical simulations in the so-called Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model show in a clear way that the whole integrability-chaos transition region is divided into three subregions: a nearly integrable regime, a nearly chaotic regime, and a crossover regime.

Dynamical obstruction to localization in a disordered spin chain

We analyze a one-dimensional XXZ spin chain in a disordered magnetic field. As the main probes of the system's behavior, we use the sensitivity of eigenstates to adiabatic transformations, as expressed through the fidelity susceptibility, in conjunction with the low-frequency asymptotes of the spectral function. We identify a region of maximal chaos-with exponentially enhanced susceptibility-which separates the many-body localized phase from the diffusive ergodic phase. This regime is characterized by slow transport, and we argue that the presence of such slow dynamics highly constrains any possible localization transition in the thermodynamic limit. Rather, the results are more consistent with absence of the localized phase.

Hilbert Space Geometry of Random Matrix Eigenstates

The geometry of multiparameter families of quantum states is important in numerous contexts, including adiabatic or nonadiabatic quantum dynamics, quantum quenches, and the characterization of quantum critical points. Here, we discuss the Hilbert space geometry of eigenstates of parameter-dependent random matrix ensembles, deriving the full probability distribution of the quantum geometric tensor for the Gaussian unitary ensemble. Our analytical results give the exact joint distribution function of the Fubini-Study metric and the Berry curvature. We discuss relations to Levy stable distributions and compare our results to numerical simulations of random matrix ensembles as well as electrons in a random magnetic field.

Persistent dark states in anisotropic central spin models

Long-lived dark states, in which an experimentally accessible qubit is not in thermal equilibrium with a surrounding spin bath, are pervasive in solid-state systems. We explain the ubiquity of dark states in a large class of inhomogeneous central spin models using the proximity to integrable lines with exact dark eigenstates. At numerically accessible sizes, dark states persist as eigenstates at large deviations from integrability, and the qubit retains memory of its initial polarization at long times. Although the eigenstates of the system are chaotic, exhibiting exponential sensitivity to small perturbations, they do not satisfy the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Rather, we predict long relaxation times that increase exponentially with system size. We propose that this intermediate chaotic but non-ergodic regime characterizes mesoscopic quantum dot and diamond defect systems, as we see no numerical tendency towards conventional thermalization with a finite relaxation time.