Real-space Mott-Anderson electron localization with long-range interactions

Real materials always contain, to some extent, randomness in the form of defects or irregularities. It is known since the seminal work of Anderson that randomness can drive a metallic phase to an insulating one, and the mechanism responsible for this transition is intrinsically different from the one of the interaction-induced transitions discovered by Mott. Lattice Hamiltonians, with their conceptual and computational advantages, permitted to investigate broadly the interplay of both mechanisms. However, a clear understanding of the differences (or not) with their real-space counterparts is lacking, especially in the presence of long-range Coulomb interactions. This work aims at shedding light on this challenging question by investigating a real-space one-dimensional model of interacting electrons in the presence of a disordered potential. The transition between delocalized and localized phases is characterized using two different indicators, namely, the single-particle occupation entropy and the position-space information entropy. In addition, the performance of density functional approximations to reproduce the exact ground-state densities of this many-body localization model are gauged.