Equivalence of Ensembles,Condensation and Glassy Dynamics in the Bose–Hubbard Hamiltonian

Journal of Statistical Physics - We study mathematically the equilibrium properties of the Bose–Hubbard Hamiltonian in the limit of a vanishing hopping amplitude. This system conserves the...     

Small perturbation of a disordered harmonic chain by a noise and an anharmonic potential

We study the thermal properties of a pinned disordered harmonic chain weakly perturbed by a noise and an anharmonic potential. The noise is controlled by a parameter $\lambda \rightarrow 0$ , and the anharmonicity by a parameter $\lambda ^{\prime } \le \lambda $ . Let $\kappa $ be the conductivity of the chain, defined through the Green–Kubo formula. Under suitable hypotheses, we show that $\kappa = \mathcal O (\lambda )$ and, in the absence of anharmonic potential, that $\kappa \sim \lambda $ . This is in sharp contrast with the ordered chain for which $\kappa \sim 1/\lambda $ , and so shows the persistence of localization effects for a non-integrable dynamics.     

Step Density Profiles in Localized Chains

We consider two types of strongly disordered one-dimensional Hamiltonian systems coupled to baths (energy or particle reservoirs) at the boundaries: strongly disordered quantum spin chains and disordered classical harmonic oscillators. These systems are believed to exhibit localization, implying in particular that the conductivity decays exponentially in the chain length L. We ask however for the profile of the (very slowly) transported quantity in the steady state. We find that this profile is a step-function, jumping in the middle of the chain from the value set by the left bath to the value set by the right bath. This is confirmed by numerics on a disordered quantum spin chain of 9 spins and on much longer chains of harmonic oscillators. From theoretical arguments, we find that the width of the step grows not faster than \(\sqrt{L}\), and we confirm this numerically for harmonic oscillators. In this case, we also observe a drastic breakdown of local equilibrium at the step, resulting in a heavily oscillating temperature profile.     

Energy Transport Through Rare Collisions

We study a one-dimensional Hamiltonian chain of masses perturbed by an energy conserving noise. The dynamics is such that, according to its Hamiltonian part, particles move freely in cells and interact with their neighbors through collisions, made possible by a small overlap of size ϵ>0 between near cells. The noise only randomly flips the velocity of the particles. If ϵ→0, and if time is rescaled by a factor 1/ϵ, we show that energy evolves autonomously according to a stochastic equation, which hydrodynamic limit is known in some cases. In particular, if only two different energies are present, the limiting process coincides with the simple symmetric exclusion process.     

Asymptotic Localization of Energy in Nondisordered Oscillator Chains

We study two popular one‐dimensional chains of classical anharmonic oscillators: the rotor chain and a version of the discrete nonlinear Schrödinger chain. We assume that the interaction between neighboring oscillators, controlled by the parameter ? > 0, is small. We rigorously establish that the thermal conductivity of the chains has a nonperturbative origin with respect to the coupling constant ?, and we provide strong evidence that it decays faster than any power law in ? as ? → 0. The weak coupling regime also translates into a high‐temperature regime, suggesting that the conductivity vanishes faster than any power of the inverse temperature. To our knowledge, it is the first time that a clear connection has been established between KAM‐like phenomena and thermal conductivity. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Theory of many-body localization in periodically driven systems

We present a theory of periodically driven, many-body localized (MBL) systems. We argue that MBL persists under periodic driving at high enough driving frequency: The Floquet operator (evolution operator over one driving period) can be represented as an exponential of an effective time-independent Hamiltonian, which is a sum of quasi-local terms and is itself fully MBL. We derive this result by constructing a sequence of canonical transformations to remove the time-dependence from the original Hamiltonian. When the driving evolves smoothly in time, the theory can be sharpened by estimating the probability of adiabatic Landau–Zener transitions at many-body level crossings. In all cases, we argue that there is delocalization at sufficiently low frequency. We propose a phase diagram of driven MBL systems.     

Energy fluctuations in simple conduction models

We introduce a class of stochastic weakly coupled map lattices, as models for studying heat conduction in solids. Each particle on the lattice evolves according to an internal dynamics that depends on its energy, and exchanges energy with its neighbors at a rate that depends on its internal state. We study energy fluctuations at equilibrium in a diffusive scaling. In some cases, we derive the hydrodynamic limit of the fluctuation field.     

Asymptotic Quantum Many-Body Localization from Thermal Disorder

We consider a quantum lattice system with infinite-dimensional on-site Hilbert space, very similar to the Bose–Hubbard model. We investigate many-body localization in this model, induced by thermal fluctuations rather than disorder in the Hamiltonian. We provide evidence that the Green–Kubo conductivity κ(β), defined as the time-integrated current autocorrelation function, decays faster than any polynomial in the inverse temperature β as \({\beta \to 0}\) . More precisely, we define approximations \({\kappa_{\tau}(\beta)}\) to κ(β) by integrating the current-current autocorrelation function up to a large but finite time \({\tau}\) and we rigorously show that \({\beta^{-n}\kappa_{\beta^{-m}}(\beta)}\) vanishes as \({\beta \to 0}\) , for any \({n,m \in \mathbb{N}}\) such that m?n is sufficiently large.     

Rigorous Scaling Law for the Heat Current in Disordered Harmonic Chain

We study the energy current in a model of heat conduction, first considered in detail by Casher and Lebowitz. The model consists of a one-dimensional disordered harmonic chain of n i.i.d. random masses, connected to their nearest neighbors via identical springs, and coupled at the boundaries to Langevin heat baths, with respective temperatures T ₁ and T _n . Let E J _n be the steady-state energy current across the chain, averaged over the masses. We prove that E J _n ~ (T ₁ − T _n )n ^−3/2 in the limit n → ∞, as has been conjectured by various authors over the time. The proof relies on a new explicit representation for the elements of the product of associated transfer matrices.