A microscopically motivated renormalization scheme for the MBL/ETH transition

Abstract

We introduce a multi-scale diagonalization scheme to study the transition between the many-body localized and the ergodic phase in disordered quantum chains. The scheme assumes a sharp dichotomy between subsystems that behave as localized and resonant spots that obey the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH). We establish a set of microscopic principles defining the diagonalization scheme, and use them to numerically study the transition in very large systems. To a large extent the results are in agreement with an analytically tractable mean-field analysis of the scheme: We find that at the critical point the system is almost surely localized in the thermodynamic limit, hosting a set of thermal inclusions whose sizes are power-law distributed. On the localized side the {\em typical} localization length is bounded from above. The bound saturates upon approach to criticality, entailing that a finite ergodic inclusion thermalizes a region of diverging diameter. The dominant thermal inclusions have a fractal structure, implying that averaged correlators decay as stretched exponentials throughout the localized phase. Slightly on the ergodic side thermalization occurs through an avalanche instability of the nearly localized bulk, whereby rare, supercritically large ergodic spots eventually thermalize the entire sample. Their size diverges at the transition, while their density vanishes. The non-local, avalanche-like nature of this instability entails a breakdown of single parameter scaling and puts the delocalization transition outside the realm of standard critical phenomena.