Many-body critical phase: extended and nonthermal

Abstract: The transition between ergodic phase and many-body localization (MBL) phase lies at the heart in understanding quantum thermalization of many-body systems. Here we predict a many-body critical phase in the one-dimensional extended Aubry-Andr\'{e}-Harper-Hubbard model, which is different from both the ergodic phase and MBL phase, implying that the quantum system hosts three different fundamental phases. It is shown that the level statistics in the many-body critical phase are well characterized by the so-called critical statistics, and the wave functions in this phase generally exhibit a multifractal behavior. We further study the half-chain entanglement entropy (EE) and thermalization properties by exact diagonalization, which show that the EE in this critical phase manifest a volume law EE scaling while the many-body states violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. This work unveils a novel many-body phase which is extended but non-ergodic.