Eigenstate phase transitions and the emergence of universal dynamics in highly excited states
Annalen der Physik 529:7 (2017)
Abstract:
© 2017 by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim We review recent advances in understanding the universal scaling properties of non-equilibrium phase transitions in non-ergodic disordered systems. We discuss dynamical critical points (also known as eigenstate phase transitions) between different many-body localized (MBL) phases, and between MBL and thermal phases. (Figure presented.).Spin-catalyzed hopping conductivity in disordered strongly interacting quantum wires
PHYSICAL REVIEW B 95:2 (2017) ARTN 024201
Fractionalizing glide reflections in two-dimensional Z2 topologically ordered phases
Physical Review B 94:12 (2016)
Abstract:
© 2016 American Physical Society. We study the fractionalization of space group symmetries in two-dimensional topologically ordered phases. Specifically, we focus on Z2-fractionalized phases in two dimensions whose deconfined topological excitations transform trivially under translational symmetries but projectively under glide reflections, whose quantum numbers are hence fractionalized. We accomplish this by generalizing the dichotomy between even and odd gauge theories to incorporate additional symmetries inherent to nonsymmorphic crystals. We show that the resulting fractionalization of point group quantum numbers can be detected in numerical studies of ground state wave functions. We illustrate these ideas using a microscopic model of a system of bosons at integer unit cell filling on a lattice with space group p4g that can be mapped to a half-magnetization plateau for an S=1/2 spin system on the Shastry-Sutherland lattice.Particle-hole symmetry, many-body localization, and topological edge modes
Physical Review B 93:13 (2016)
Abstract:
© 2016 American Physical Society. We study the excited states of interacting fermions in one dimension with particle-hole symmetric disorder (equivalently, random-bond XXZ chains) using a combination of renormalization group methods and exact diagonalization. Absent interactions, the entire many-body spectrum exhibits infinite-randomness quantum critical behavior with highly degenerate excited states. We show that though interactions are an irrelevant perturbation in the ground state, they drastically affect the structure of excited states: Even arbitrarily weak interactions split the degeneracies in favor of thermalization (weak disorder) or spontaneously broken particle-hole symmetry, driving the system into a many-body localized spin glass phase (strong disorder). In both cases, the quantum critical properties of the noninteracting model are destroyed, either by thermal decoherence or spontaneous symmetry breaking. This system then has the interesting and counterintuitive property that edges of the many-body spectrum are less localized than the center of the spectrum. We argue that our results rule out the existence of certain excited state symmetry-protected topological orders.Hall effect anomaly and low-temperature metamagnetism in the Kondo compound CeAgBi2
Physical Review B American Physical Society (APS) 93:7 (2016) 075149