A route towards engineering many-body localization in real materials

The interplay of interactions and disorder in a quantum many body system may lead to the elusive phenomenon of many body localization (MBL). It has been observed under precisely controlled conditions in synthetic quantum many-body systems, but to detect it in actual quantum materials seems challenging. In this work, we present a path to synthesize real materials that show signatures of many body localization by mixing different species of materials in the laboratory. To provide evidence for the functioning of our approach, we perform a detailed tensor-network based numerical analysis to study the effects of various doping ratios of the constituting materials. Moreover, in order to provide guidance to experiments, we investigate different choices of actual candidate materials. To address the challenge of how to achieve stability under heating, we study the effect of the electron-phonon coupling, focusing on effectively one dimensional materials embedded in one, two and three dimensional lattices. We analyze how this coupling affects the MBL and provide an intuitive microscopic description of the interplay between the electronic degrees of freedom and the lattice vibrations. Our work provides a guideline for the necessary conditions on the properties of the ingredient materials and, as such, serves as a road map to experimentally synthesizing real quantum materials exhibiting signatures of MBL.
Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures