Quantum critical behavior at the many-body-localization transition

Understand

Phase transitions are driven by collective fluctuations of a system's constituents that emerge at a critical point.

• This mechanism has been extensively explored for classical and quantum systems in equilibrium, whose critical behavior is described by a general theory of phase transitions.
• Recently, however, fundamentally distinct phase transitions have been discovered for out-of-equilibrium quantum systems, which can exhibit critical behavior that defies this description and is not well understood.
• A paradigmatic example is the many-body-localization (MBL) transition, which marks the breakdown of quantum thermalization.