with Romain Vasseur (UC Berkeley) and Sid Parameswaran (UC Irvine)
In a new preprint, we developed a new technique for looking at phase transitions between many-body localized phases (quantum glasses that do not obey the laws of thermodynamic equilibrium) and thermal classical fluids. This is a novel type of criticality – between quantum and classical – in which the laws of thermodynamics break down sharply at a phase transition.
In closed quantum systems, strong randomness can localize many-body excitations, preventing ergodicity. An interesting consequence is that high energy excited states can exhibit quantum coherent properties, such as symmetry protected topological (SPT) order, that otherwise only occur in equilibrium ground states. In a recent preprint with A. Vishwanath, we investigate which types of SPT orders can be realized in highly excited states of a many-body (MB) localized system.
Potter - Physics Research 