Statistical Description of Hamiltonian Mixed Phase space systems and many Body Localization
Typical physical systems follow deterministic behavior. This behavior can be sensitive to initial conditions, such that it is very difficult to predict their behavior in the longtime limit. The resulting motion is chaotic and looks stochastic or random. In many cases the motion is described by a Hamiltonian and the energy is conserved. The motion can be also regular, that is predictable. In the work reported here we studied systems where depending on initial conditions the motion is either regular or chaotic. The simplest systems of this type are of two degrees-of-freedom, or periodically kicked systems with one degree-of-freedom. For this type of system, transport in the chaotic regions of phase space is dominated by sticking to complicated structures in the vicinity of the regular region. The probability to stay in the vicinity of the initial point is a power law in time characterized by some exponent. The question of the value of this exponent and its universality is the subject of a long controversy. We have developed a statistical description for this type of systems, where statistics are with respect to parameter or family of systems rather than to initial conditions. Following previous studies, it is based on a scaling of periodic and quasi-periodic orbits in a way which relies heavily on number theory. We have found an indication that the statistics of scaling is parameter independent and might be relevant for a wider universality class including the systems we explored. This statistical description is implemented in a stochastic Markov model proposed by Meiss and Ott in 1986. Even though many approximations are used, it predicts important results quantitatively, showing the power law decay exponent to be approximately 1.57 in agreement with direct simulations done in this work and also other works. Its universality is inferred from the universality of the scaling statistics. The model systems used in this work are paradigms for chaotic dynamics (the H'enon map and the standard map) therefore it might indicate a wider universality class. Quantum manifestation of this phenomenon and its relevance for time correlations, is showing different behavior for increasing effective Planck's constant, namely, the Planck's constant divided by the typical action. By using recent results regarding the universality of wave function transmission across barriers in phase space, we generalize the use of the Markov model to describe the results after some modification.
It is claimed that multi-fractality for the many body localization problem results from a tree structure similar to the one of the Meiss-Ott model.
The work reported was done in collaboration with Or Alus, James Meiss and Mark Srednicki