Signatures of slow particle transport in the interacting Aubry-André chain
Abstract
Slow delocalization in strongly disordered many-body quantum chains can originate from two distinct mechanisms: rare resonances and avalanches, rooted in the energy statistics, or an energy-independent combinatorial path-entropy obstruction in operator space. Quasiperiodic potentials eliminate rare regions with similar potentials that are thought to be responsible for avalanche instabilities and modify the statistics of resonances, thus allowing us to delineate the two mechanisms. To do so, we numerically study the entanglement entropy S(t), number entropy SN(t), and Hartley number entropy SH(t) following a quantum quench in the interacting Aubry-André chain with disorder strength D. We find S(t)∼μln t, SN(t)∼νlnln t with growth rates μ∼ν∼ D−γ and γ≈ 3, the same behavior that was previously found in the case of quenched disorder. Furthermore, the saturation values SH(t→∞) continue to grow with system size L as ln L, a growth that persists for D≳ 8 where MBL was argued to be stable. The similarity of the quasi-periodic and quenched disorder cases points to a common origin of the slow particle transport that does not rely on rare-region avalanches and persists despite strongly modified resonance statistics.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{sharifan2026signatures,
title = {{Signatures of slow particle transport in the interacting Aubry-André chain}},
author = {S. Sharifan and M. Kiefer-Emmanouilidis and J. Sirker},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.25557},
eprint = {2610.25557},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25557},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Signatures of slow particle transport in the interacting Aubry-André chain
AU - S. Sharifan
AU - M. Kiefer-Emmanouilidis
AU - J. Sirker
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/18
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.25557
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25557
AB - Slow delocalization in strongly disordered many-body quantum chains can originate from two distinct mechanisms: rare resonances and avalanches, rooted in the energy statistics, or an energy-independent combinatorial path-entropy obstruction in operator space. Quasiperiodic potentials eliminate rare regions with similar potentials that are thought to be responsible for avalanche instabilities and modify the statistics of resonances, thus allowing us to delineate the two mechanisms. To do so, we numerically study the entanglement entropy S(t), number entropy S_N(t), and Hartley number entropy S_H(t) following a quantum quench in the interacting Aubry-André chain with disorder strength D. We find S(t)∼μln t, S_N(t)∼νlnln t with growth rates μ∼ν∼ D^−γ and γ≈ 3, the same behavior that was previously found in the case of quenched disorder. Furthermore, the saturation values S_H(t→∞) continue to grow with system size L as ln L, a growth that persists for D≳ 8 where MBL was argued to be stable. The similarity of the quasi-periodic and quenched disorder cases points to a common origin of the slow particle transport that does not rely on rare-region avalanches and persists despite strongly modified resonance statistics.
ER -