English

Many-body localisation implies that eigenvectors are matrix-product states

Quantum Physics 2015-05-06 v2 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

The phenomenon of many-body localisation received a lot of attention recently, both for its implications in condensed-matter physics of allowing systems to be an insulator even at non-zero temperature as well as in the context of the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics, providing examples of systems showing the absence of thermalisation following out-of-equilibrium dynamics. In this work, we establish a novel link between dynamical properties - the absence of a group velocity and transport - with entanglement properties of individual eigenvectors. Using Lieb-Robinson bounds and filter functions, we prove rigorously under simple assumptions on the spectrum that if a system shows strong dynamical localisation, all of its many-body eigenvectors have clustering correlations. In one dimension this implies directly an entanglement area law, hence the eigenvectors can be approximated by matrix-product states. We also show this statement for parts of the spectrum, allowing for the existence of a mobility edge above which transport is possible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1409.1252,
  title  = {Many-body localisation implies that eigenvectors are matrix-product states},
  author = {M. Friesdorf and A. H. Werner and W. Brown and V. B. Scholz and J. Eisert},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.1252},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

13 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T05:48:03.089Z