Sensitivity to perturbations in the three-dimensional Anderson model

Abstract

We investigate the fidelity susceptibility, which quantifies the sensitivity of single-particle eigenstates to perturbations, in the three-dimensional Anderson model. As a function of disorder strength $W$, it exhibits two distinct peaks. The first peak signals a crossover at weak disorder strength from plane-wave states to single-particle quantum chaos, and its position shifts toward $W\to 0$ in the thermodynamic limit. The second peak emerges, to high numerical accuracy, at the critical disorder strength associated with the Anderson localization transition. We further show that the divergence of the first peak is maximal, scaling as the square of the inverse frequency cutoff, whereas the divergence of the second peak is submaximal. We relate the latter suppression to the fractal structure of single-particle eigenstates at criticality. We discuss two distinct scenarios that give rise to the peaks in the fidelity susceptibilities. Moreover, studying the scaling of typical fidelity susceptibilities above the Anderson transition, we find evidence of two distinct regimes of nonergodic behavior.