Many-body ground state localization and coexistence of localized and extended states in an interacting quasiperiodic system

Abstract

We study the localization problem of one-dimensional interacting spinless fermions in an incommensurate optical lattice, which changes from an extended phase to a nonergoic many-body localized phase by increasing the strength of the incommensurate potential. We identify that there exists an intermediate regime before the system enters the many-body localized phase, in which both the localized and extended many-body states coexist, thus the system is divided into three different phases, which can be characterized by normalized participation ratios of the many-body eigenstates and distributions of natural orbitals of the corresponding one-particle density matrix. This is very different from its noninterating limit, in which all eigenstaes undergo a delocaliztion-localization transtion when the strength of the incommensurate potential exceeds a critical value.

5 pages, 6 figures