Critical states and anomalous mobility edges in two-dimensional diagonal quasicrystals

Abstract

We study the single-particle properties of two-dimensional quasicrystals where the underlying geometry of the tight-binding lattice is crystalline but the on-site potential is quasicrystalline. We will focus on the 2D generalised Aubry-Andr\'e model which has a varying form to its quasiperiodic potential, through a deformation parameter and varied irrational periods of cosine terms, which allows a continuous family of on-site quasicrystalline models to be studied. We show that the 2D generalised Aubry-Andr\'e model exhibits single-particle mobility edges between extended and localised states and a localisation transition in a similar manner to the prior studied one-dimensional limit. However, we find that such models in two dimensions are dominated across large parameter regions by critical states. The presence of critical states results in anomalous mobility edges between both extended and critical and localised and critical states in the single-particle spectrum, even when there is no mobility edge between extended and localised states present. Due to this, these models exhibit anomalous diffusion of initially localised states across the majority of parameter regions, including deep in the normally localised regime. The presence of critical states in large parameter regimes and throughout the spectrum will have consequences for the many-body properties of quasicrystals, including the formation of the Bose glass and the potential to host a many-body localised phase.