Many body localisation: Dead or alive?

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• Philip Crowley, Harvard/MIT
• Thursday 25 May 2023, 13:15-14:30
• Theory Library.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Hannah Price.

A series of recent numerical studies have concluded that the many-body localised (MBL) phase does not exist in the thermodynamic limit. This contrasts with the consensus of the prior 15 years, that a stable MBL is found in sufficiently strongly disordered thermodynamic quantum chains.

Efforts to compare resolve this lack of consensus have been hampered by limited theoretical understanding of the nature or severity of finite-size corrections that should be anticipated in numerical studies.

I will discuss how this controversy emerged, and present such a theory of the MBL -thermal crossover accessible to numerical studies. This theory suggests that in the finite-size crossover, the MBL phase is destabilised by a different physical mechanism (proliferation of rare many body resonances) than the predicted asymptotic transition (quantum avalanches induced by rare thermal inclusions). This theory predicts much of the phenomenology observed in numerical studies, and is consistent with the existence of an MBL phase at strong disorder.

This talk is part of the Theoretical Physics Seminars series.

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• Bham Talks
• Theoretical Physics Seminars
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