Shankar Iyer, Vadim Oganesyan, Gil Refael, David A. Huse
Recent theoretical and numerical evidence suggests that localization can survive the introduction of interactions in excited disordered many-body systems, giving rise to a so-called many-body localization transition. This dynamical phase transition is relevant to questions of thermalization in extended quantum systems. It separates a many-body localized phase, in which localization prevents transport and thermalization, from a conducting ("ergodic") phase in which the usual assumptions of quantum statistical mechanics hold. Here, we present numerical evidence that many-body localization also occurs in models without disorder but rather a quasiperiodic potential. In one dimension, these systems already have a single-particle localization transition, and we show that this transition becomes a many-body localization transition upon the introduction of interactions. We also comment on possible relevance of our results to experimental studies of many-body dynamics of cold atoms and non-linear light in quasiperiodic potentials.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.4159
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