Eigenstate properties of the disordered Bose–Hubbard chain

Abstract

Many-body localization (MBL) of a disordered interacting boson system in one dimension is studied numerically at the filling faction one-half. The von Neumann entanglement entropy S_vN is commonly used to detect the MBL phase transition but remains challenging to be directly measured. Based on the U(1) symmetry from the particle number conservation, S_vN can be decomposed into the particle number entropy S_N and the configuration entropy S_C. In light of the tendency that the eigenstate’s S_C nears zero in the localized phase, we introduce a quantity describing the deviation of S_N from the ideal thermalization distribution; finite-size scaling analysis illustrates that it shares the same phase transition point with S_vN but displays the better critical exponents. This observation hints that the phase transition to MBL might largely be determined by S_N and its fluctuations. Notably, the recent experiments [A. Lukin, et al., Science 364, 256 (2019); J. Léonard, et al., Nat. Phys. 19, 481 (2023)] demonstrated that this deviation can potentially be measured through the S_N measurement. Furthermore, our investigations reveal that the thermalized states primarily occupy the low-energy section of the spectrum, as indicated by measures of localization length, gap ratio, and energy density distribution. This low-energy spectrum of the Bose model closely resembles the entire spectrum of the Fermi (or spin XXZ) model, accommodating a transition from the thermalized to the localized states. While, owing to the bosonic statistics, the high-energy spectrum of the model allows the formation of distinct clusters of bosons in the random potential background. We analyze the resulting eigenstate properties and briefly summarize the associated dynamics. To distinguish between the phase regions at the low and high energies, a probing quantity based on the structure of S_vN is also devised. Our work highlights the importance of symmetry combined with entanglement in the study of MBL. In this regard, for the disordered Heisenberg XXZ chain, the recent pure eigenvalue analyses in [J. Suntajs, et al., Phys. Rev. E 102, 062144 (2020)] would appear inadequate, while methods used in [A. Morningstar, et al., Phys. Rev. B 105, 174205 (2022)] that spoil the U(1) symmetry could be misleading.