Renormalization-Group Analysis of the Many-Body Localization Transition in the Random-Field XXZ Chain

We analyze the spectral properties of the Heisenberg spin-1/2 chain with random fields in light of recent works of the renormalization-group flow of the Anderson model in infinite dimension. We reconstruct the beta function of the order parameter from the numerical data, and show that it does not admit a one-parameter scaling form and a simple Wilson-Fisher fixed point. Rather, it is compatible with a two-parameter, Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-like flow with a line of fixed points (the many-body localized phase), which terminates into the localization transition critical point. Therefore, we argue that previous studies, which assumed the existence of an isolated Wilson- Fisher fixed point and performed one-parameter finite-size scaling analysis, could not explain the numerical data in a coherent way.

💡 Research Summary

The authors investigate the many‑body localization (MBL) transition in the random‑field spin‑½ XXZ chain, whose Hamiltonian is
( \hat H = J\sum_{i=1}^{L}\hat{\mathbf S}i!\cdot!\hat{\mathbf S}{i+1} + \sum_{i=1}^{L} h_i \hat S_i^z)
with uniformly distributed fields (h_i\in