Title: Many-body localization

Abstract: In this seminar I will discuss some aspects of the present theoretical understanding of many-body localization (MBL) and the novel dynamic phase transition from MBL to thermalization. Many-body localization is the interacting version of Anderson localization in highly-excited states of a quantum many-body system. It is the failure of such a system to (self-)thermalize: MBL systems fail to act a bath for themselves and bring their subsystems to thermal equilibrium. MBL is a type of emergent integrability with a complete set of localized conserved operators. However, these conservation laws do not really produce good quantum numbers, so weak level repulsion and many-body resonances remain within the MBL phase. In this sense the MBL phase is a “gapless” critical phase, and it is quite fragile to very slow thermalization.

Note: This was a blackboard talk and not recorded.