Robust non-ergodicity of ground state in the β ensemble


Abstract

In various chaotic quantum many-body systems, the ground states show nontrivial athermal behavior despite the bulk states exhibiting thermalization. Such athermal states play a crucial role in quantum information theory and its applications. Moreover, any generic quantum many-body system in the Krylov basis is represented by a tridiagonal Lanczos Hamiltonian, which is analogous to the matrices from the 𝛽ensemble, a well-studied random-matrix model with level repulsion tunable via the parameter 𝛽. Motivated by this, here we focus on the localization properties of the ground and anti-ground states of the 𝛽ensemble. Both analytically and numerically we show that both the edge states demonstrate nonergodic (fractal) properties for 𝛽∼𝒪⁡(1), while the typical bulk states are ergodic. Surprisingly, the fractal dimension of the edge states remains three times smaller than that of the bulk states irrespective of the global phase of the 𝛽ensemble. In addition to the fractal dimensions, we also consider the distribution of the localization centers of the spectral edge states, their mutual separation, as well as the spatial and correlation properties of the first excited states.

Published

Physical Review B

Links

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.109.064206


Preprint