Many-Body Localization in Disordered Quantum Spin Chain and Finite-Temperature Gutzwiller Projection in Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model

Abstract

The transition between many-body localized states and the delocalized thermal states is an eigenstate phase transition at finite energy density outside the scope of conventional quantum statistical mechanics. We apply support vector machine (SVM) to study the phase transition between many-body localized and thermal phases in a disordered quantum Ising chain in a transverse external field. The many-body eigenstate energy E is bounded by a bandwidth W=Eₘₐₓ-Eₘᵢₙ. The transition takes place on a phase diagram spanned by the energy density ϵ=2(Eₘₐₓ-Eₘᵢₙ)/W and the disorder strength ẟJ of the spin interaction uniformly distributed within [-ẟJ, ẟJ], formally parallel to the mobility edge in Anderson localization. In our study we use the labeled probability density of eigenstate wavefunctions belonging to the deeply localized and thermal regimes at two different energy densities (ϵ's) as the training set, i.e., providing labeled data at four corners of the phase diagram. Then we employ the trained SVM to predict the whole phase diagram. The obtained phase boundary qualitatively agrees with previous work using entanglement entropy to characterize these two phases. We further analyze the decision function of the SVM to interpret its physical meaning and find that it is analogous to the inverse participation ratio in configuration space. Our findings demonstrate the ability of the SVM to capture potential quantities that may characterize the many-body localization phase transition. To further investigate the properties of the transition, we study the behavior of the entanglement entropy of a subsystem of size L_A in a system of size L > L_A near the critical regime of the many-body localization transition. The many-body eigenstates are obtained by exact diagonalization of a disordered quantum spin chain under twisted boundary conditions to reduce the finite-size effect. We present a scaling theory based on the assumption that the transition is continuous and use the subsystem size L_A/ξ as the scaling variable, where ξ is the correlation length. We show that this scaling theory provides an effective description of the critical behavior and that the entanglement entropy follows the thermal volume law at the transition point. We extract the critical exponent governing the divergence of ξ upon approaching the transition point. We again study the participation entropy in the spin-basis of the domain wall excitations and show that the transition point and the critical exponent agree with those obtained from finite size scaling of the entanglement entropy. Our findings suggest that the many-body localization transition in this model is continuous and describable as a localization transition in the many-body configuration space. Besides the many-body localization transition driven by disorder, We also study the Coulomb repulsion and temperature driving phase transitions. We apply a finite-temperature Gutzwiller projection to two-dimensional Hubbard model by constructing a "Gutzwiller-type" density matrix operator to approximate the real interacting density matrix, which provides the upper bound of free energy of the system. We firstly investigate half filled Hubbard model without magnetism and obtain the phase diagram. The transition line is of first order at finite temperature, ending at 2 second order points, which shares qualitative agreement with dynamic mean field results. We derive the analytic form of the free energy and therefor the equation of states, which benefits the understanding of the different phases. We later extend our approach to take anti-ferromagnetic order into account. We determine the Neel temperature and explore its interesting behavior when varying the Coulomb repulsion.