English

Logarithmic Entanglement Lightcone in Many-Body Localized Systems

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2017-01-17 v3 Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

We theoretically study the response of a many-body localized system to a local quench from a quantum information perspective. We find that the local quench triggers entanglement growth throughout the whole system, giving rise to a logarithmic lightcone. This saturates the modified Lieb-Robinson bound for quantum information propagation in many-body localized systems previously conjectured based on the existence of local integrals of motion. In addition, near the localization-delocalization transition, we find that the final states after the local quench exhibit volume-law entanglement. We also show that the local quench induces a deterministic orthogonality catastrophe for highly excited eigenstates, where the typical wave-function overlap between the pre- and post-quench eigenstates decays {\it exponentially} with the system size.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.08611,
  title  = {Logarithmic Entanglement Lightcone in Many-Body Localized Systems},
  author = {Dong-Ling Deng and Xiaopeng Li and J. H. Pixley and Yang-Le Wu and S. Das Sarma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.08611},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

6 pages, 5 figures. version published in Phys. Rev. B

R2 v1 2026-06-22T15:07:08.348Z