Weak- versus strong-disorder superfluid—Bose glass transition in one dimension

We consider low-temperature behavior of weakly interacting electrons in disordered conductors in the regime when all single-particle eigenstates are localized by the quenched disorder. We prove that in the absence of coupling of the electrons to any external bath dc electrical conductivity exactly vanishes as long as the temperatute \(T\) does not exceed some finite value \(T_c\). At the same time, it can be also proven that at high enough \(T\) the conductivity is finite. These two statements imply that the system undergoes a finite temperature Metal-to-Insulator transition, which can be viewed as Anderson-like localization of many-body wave functions in the Fock space. Metallic and insulating states are not different from each other by any spatial or discrete symmetries. We formulate the effective Hamiltonian description of the system at low energies (of the order of the level spacing in the single-particle localization volume). In the metallic phase quantum Boltzmann equation is valid, allowing to find the kinetic coefficients. In the insulating phase, \(T

We experimentally observe many-body localization of interacting fermions in a one-dimensional quasi-random optical lattice. We identify the many-body localization transition through the relaxation dynamics of an initially-prepared charge density wave. For sufficiently weak disorder the time evolution appears ergodic and thermalizing, erasing all remnants of the initial order. In contrast, above a critical disorder strength a significant portion of the initial ordering persists, thereby serving as an effective order parameter for localization. The stationary density wave order and the critical disorder value show a distinctive dependence on the interaction strength, in agreement with numerical simulations. We connect this dependence to the ubiquitous logarithmic growth of entanglement entropy characterizing the generic many-body localized phase.