Quantum chaos challenges many-body localization

Understand

Characterizing states of matter through the lens of their ergodic properties is a fascinating new direction of research.

• In the quantum realm, the many-body localization (MBL) was proposed to be the paradigmatic ergodicity breaking phenomenon, which extends the concept of Anderson localization to interacting systems.
• At the same time, random matrix theory has established a powerful framework for characterizing the onset of quantum chaos and ergodicity (or the absence thereof) in quantum many-body systems.
• Here we numerically study the spectral statistics of disordered interacting spin chains, which represent prototype models expected to exhibit MBL.