Universal properties of many-body delocalization transitions

We study the dynamical melting of "hot" one-dimensional many-body localized systems. As disorder is weakened below a critical value these non-thermal quantum glasses melt via a continuous dynamical phase transition into classical thermal liquids. By accounting for collective resonant tunneling processes, we derive and numerically solve an effective model for such quantum-to-classical transitions and compute their universal critical properties. Notably, the classical thermal liquid exhibits a broad regime of anomalously slow sub-diffusive equilibration dynamics and energy transport. The subdiffusive regime is characterized by a continuously evolving dynamical critical exponent that diverges with a universal power at the transition. Our approach elucidates the universal long-distance, low-energy scaling structure of many-body delocalization transitions in one dimension, in a way that is transparently connected to the underlying microscopic physics.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures; major changes from v1, including a modified approach and new emphasis on conventional MBL systems rather than their critical variant

Fluidization of collisionless plasma turbulence

In a collisionless, magnetized plasma, particles may stream freely along magnetic-field lines, leading to phase "mixing" of their distribution function and consequently to smoothing out of any "compressive" fluctuations (of density, pressure, etc.,). This rapid mixing underlies Landau damping of these fluctuations in a quiescent plasma-one of the most fundamental physical phenomena that make plasma different from a conventional fluid. Nevertheless, broad power-law spectra of compressive fluctuations are observed in turbulent astrophysical plasmas (most vividly, in the solar wind) under conditions conducive to strong Landau damping. Elsewhere in nature, such spectra are normally associated with fluid turbulence, where energy cannot be dissipated in the inertial scale range and is therefore cascaded from large scales to small. By direct numerical simulations and theoretical arguments, it is shown here that turbulence of compressive fluctuations in collisionless plasmas strongly resembles one in a collisional fluid and does have broad power-law spectra. This "fluidization" of collisionless plasmas occurs because phase mixing is strongly suppressed on average by "stochastic echoes", arising due to nonlinear advection of the particle distribution by turbulent motions. Besides resolving the long-standing puzzle of observed compressive fluctuations in the solar wind, our results suggest a conceptual shift for understanding kinetic plasma turbulence generally: rather than being a system where Landau damping plays the role of dissipation, a collisionless plasma is effectively dissipationless except at very small scales. The universality of "fluid" turbulence physics is thus reaffirmed even for a kinetic, collisionless system

Cavity method for force transmission in jammed disordered packings of hard particles

The force distribution of jammed disordered packings has always been considered a central object in the physics of granular materials. However, many of its features are poorly understood. In particular, analytic relations to other key macroscopic properties of jammed matter, such as the contact network and its coordination number, are still lacking. Here we develop a mean-field theory for this problem, based on the consideration of the contact network as a random graph where the force transmission becomes a constraint optimization problem. We can thus use the cavity method developed in the last decades within the statistical physics of spin glasses and hard computer science problems. This method allows us to compute the force distribution $\text P(f)$ for random packings of hard particles of any shape, with or without friction. We find a new signature of jamming in the small force behavior $\text P(f) \sim f^{\theta}$, whose exponent has attracted recent active interest: we find a finite value for $\text P(f=0)$, along with $\theta=0$. Furthermore, we relate the force distribution to a lower bound of the average coordination number $\, {\bar z}_{\rm c}^{\rm min}(\mu)$ of jammed packings of frictional spheres with coefficient $\mu$. This bridges the gap between the two known isostatic limits $\, {\bar z}_{\rm c}(\mu=0)=2D$ (in dimension $D$) and $\, {\bar z}_{\rm c}(\mu \to \infty)=D+1$ by extending the naive Maxwell's counting argument to frictional spheres. The theoretical framework describes different types of systems, such as non-spherical objects in arbitrary dimensions, providing a common mean-field scenario to investigate force transmission, contact networks and coordination numbers of jammed disordered packings

Hydrodynamics of operator spreading and quasiparticle diffusion in interacting integrable systems

We address the hydrodynamics of operator spreading in interacting integrable lattice models. In these models, operators spread through the ballistic propagation of quasiparticles, with an operator front whose velocity is locally set by the fastest quasiparticle velocity. In interacting integrable systems, this velocity depends on the density of the other quasiparticles, so equilibrium density fluctuations cause the front to follow a biased random walk, and therefore to broaden diffusively. Ballistic front propagation and diffusive front broadening are also generically present in non-integrable systems in one dimension; thus, although the mechanisms for operator spreading are distinct in the two cases, these coarse grained measures of the operator front do not distinguish between the two cases. We present an expression for the front-broadening rate; we explicitly derive this for a particular integrable model (the "Floquet-Fredrickson-Andersen" model), and argue on kinetic grounds that it should apply generally. Our results elucidate the microscopic mechanism for diffusive corrections to ballistic transport in interacting integrable models.Comment: Published versio