A simple model of many-body localization

Brian Swingle

Published 2013-07-01Version 1

We study a simple and tractable model of many-body localization. The main idea is to take a renormalization group perspective in which local entanglement is removed to reach a product state. The model is built from a random local unitary which implements a real space renormalization procedure and a fixed point Hamiltonian with random exponentially decaying interactions. We prove that every energy eigenstate is localized, that energy is not transported, and argue that despite being fine tuned, the model is stable to perturbations. We also show that every energy eigenstate obeys an area law for entanglement entropy and we consider the dynamics of entanglement entropy under perturbations. In the case of extensive pertubations we recover a logarithmic growth of entanglement observed in recent numerical simulations.