Hilbert-Glass Transition: New Universality of Temperature-Tuned Many-Body Dynamical Quantum Criticality

Abstract

We study a new class of unconventional critical phenomena that is characterized by singularities only in dynamical quantities and has no thermodynamic signatures. One example of such a transition is the recently proposed many-body localization-delocalization transition, in which transport coefficients vanish at a critical temperature with no singularities in thermodynamic observables. Describing this purely dynamical quantum criticality is technically challenging as understanding the finite-temperature dynamics necessarily requires averaging over a large number of matrix elements between many-body eigenstates. Here, we develop a real-space renormalization group method for excited states that allows us to overcome this challenge in a large class of models. We characterize a specific example: the 1 D disordered transverse-field Ising model with generic interactions. While thermodynamic phase transitions are generally forbidden in this model, using the real-space renormalization group method for excited states we find a finite-temperature dynamical transition between two localized phases. The transition is characterized by nonanalyticities in the low-frequency heat conductivity and in the long-time (dynamic) spin correlation function. The latter is a consequence of an up-down spin symmetry that results in the appearance of an Edwards-Anderson-like order parameter in one of the localized phases.