Probing the randomness of ergodic states: extreme-value statistics in the ergodic and many-body-localized phases

Abstract

The extreme-value statistics of the entanglement spectrum in disordered spin chains possessing a many-body localization transition is examined. It is expected that eigenstates in the metallic or ergodic phase, behave as random states and hence the eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix, commonly referred to as the entanglement spectrum, are expected to follow the eigenvalue statistics of a trace normalized Wishart ensemble. In particular, the density of eigenvalues is supposed to follow the universal Marchenko-Pastur distribution. We find deviations in the tails both for the disordered XXZ with total $S_z$ conserved in the half-filled sector as well as in a model that breaks this conservation. A sensitive measure of deviations is provided by the largest eigenvalue, which in the case of the Wishart ensemble after appropriate shift and scaling follows the universal Tracy-Widom distribution. We show that for the models considered, in the metallic phase, the largest eigenvalue of the reduced density matrix of eigenvector, instead follows the generalized extreme-value statistics bordering on the Fisher-Tipett-Gumbel distribution indicating that the correlations between eigenvalues are much weaker compared to the Wishart ensemble. We show by means of distributions conditional on the high entropy and normalized participation ratio of eigenstates that the conditional entanglement spectrum still follows generalized extreme value distribution. In the deeply localized phase we find heavy tailed distributions and L\'evy stable laws in an appropriately scaled function of the largest and second largest eigenvalues. The scaling is motivated by a recently developed perturbation theory of weakly coupled chaotic systems.