Universal Properties of Many-Body Delocalization Transitions

We study the dynamical melting of “hot” one-dimensional many-body localized systems. As disorder is weakened below a critical value, these nonthermal quantum glasses melt via a continuous dynamical phase transition into classical thermal liquids. By accounting for collective resonant tunneling processes, we derive and numerically solve an effective model for such quantum-to-classical transitions and compute their universal critical properties. Notably, the classical thermal liquid exhibits a broad regime of anomalously slow subdiffusive equilibration dynamics and energy transport. The subdiffusive regime is characterized by a continuously evolving dynamical critical exponent that diverges with a universal power at the transition. Our approach elucidates the universal long-distance, low-energy scaling structure of many-body delocalization transitions in one dimension, in a way that is transparently connected to the underlying microscopic physics. We discuss experimentally testable signatures of the predicted scaling properties.