Significant and persistent trajectory-to-trajectory variance are commonly observed in the particle tracking experiments, which have become a major challenge for the experiment data analysis. In this theoretical paper, we investigate the ergodicity recovery behavior, which helps to clarify the origin and the convergence of trajectory-to-trajectory fluctuation in various heterogeneous disordered media. The concepts of self-averaging and ergodicity are revisited in the context of trajectory analysis. The slow ergodicity recovery and the non-Gaussian diffusion in the annealed disordered media are shown as the consequences of the central limit theorem in different situations. The strange ergodicity recovery behavior is reported in the quenched disordered case, which arises from a localization mechanism. The first-passage approach is introduced to the ergodicity analysis for this case, of which the central limit theorem can be employed and the ergodicity is recovered in the length scale of diffusivity correlation.
We present here for the first time a unifying perspective for the lack of equipartition in non-linear ordered systems and the low temperature phase-space fragmentation in disordered systems. We demonstrate that they are just two manifestation of the same underlying phenomenon: ergodicity breaking. Inspired by recent experiments, suggesting that lasing in optically active disordered media is related to an ergodicity-breaking transition, we studied numerically a statistical mechanics model for the nonlinearly coupled light modes in a disordered medium under external pumping. Their collective beh…
We study disorder-induced ergodicity breaking transition in high-energy eigenstates of interacting spin-1/2 chains. Using exact diagonalization we introduce a cost function approach to quantitatively compare different scenarios for the eigenstate transition. We study ergodicity indicators such as the eigenstate entanglement entropy and the spectral level spacing ratio, and we consistently find that an (infinite-order) Kosterlitz-Thouless transition yields a lower cost function when compared to a finite-order transition. Interestingly, we observe that the transition point in finite systems exhi…
We show how U(1) lattice gauge theories display key signatures of ergodicity breaking in the presence of a random charge background. Contrary to the widely studied case of spin models, in the presence of Coulomb interactions, the spectral properties of such lattice gauge theories are very weakly affected by finite-volume effects. This allows to draw a sharp boundary for the ergodic regime, and thus the breakdown of quantum chaos for sufficiently strong gauge couplings, at the system sizes accessible via exact diagonalization. Our conclusions are independent on the value of a background topolog…
We consider a chain of interacting fermions with random disorder that was intensively studied in the context of many-body localization. We show that only a small fraction of the two-body interaction represents a true local perturbation to the Anderson insulator. While this true perturbation is nonzero at any finite disorder strength W, it decreases with increasing W. This establishes a view that the strongly disordered system should be viewed as a weakly perturbed integrable model, i.e., a weakly perturbed Anderson insulator. As a consequence, the latter can hardly be distinguished from a stri…
We show that spatial quenched disorder affects polar active matter in ways more complex and far-reaching than believed heretofore. Using simulations of the 2D Vicsek model subjected to random couplings or a disordered scattering field, we find in particular that ergodicity is lost in the ordered phase, the nature of which we show to depend qualitatively on the type of quenched disorder: for random couplings, it remains long-range ordered, but qualitatively different from the pure (disorderless) case. For random scatterers, polar order varies with system size but we find strong non-self-averagi…
The supercritical series expansion of the survival probability for the one-dimensional contact process in heterogeneous and disordered lattices is used for the evaluation of the loci of critical points and critical exponents $β$. The heterogeneity and disorder are modeled by considering binary regular and irregular lattices of nodes characterized by different recovery rates and identical transmission rates. Two analytical approaches based on Nested Padé approximants and Partial Differential approximants were used in the case of expansions with respect to two variables (two recovery rates) for …
We show that non-interacting disordered electrons on a Bethe lattice display a new intermediate phase which is delocalized but non-ergodic, i.e. it is characterized by Poisson instead of GOE statistics. The physical signature of this phase is a very heterogenous transport that proceeds over a few disorder dependent paths only. We show that the transition to the usual ergodic delocalized phase, which takes place for a disorder strength smaller than the one leading to the localization transition, is related to the freezing-glass transition of directed polymers in random media. The numerical stud…
The statistics of random-matrix spectra can be very sensitive to the unfolding procedure that separates global from local properties. In order to avoid the introduction of possible artifacts, recently it has been applied to ergodic ensembles of Random Matrix Theory (RMT) the singular value decomposition (SVD) method, based on normal mode analysis, which characterizes the long-range correlations of the spectral fluctuations in a direct way without performing any unfolding. However, in the case of more general ensembles, the ergodicity property is often broken leading to ambiguities between spec…
Quantum systems that violate the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis thereby falling outside the paradigm of conventional statistical mechanics are of both intellectual and practical interest. We show that such a breaking of ergodicity may arise purely due to local constraints on random many-body Hamiltonians. As an example, we study an ergodic quantum spin-1/2 model which acquires a localised phase upon addition of East-type constraints. We establish its phenomenology using spectral and dynamical properties obtained by exact diagonalisation. Mapping the Hamiltonian to a disordered hopping pr…
In this letter, we apply the artificial neural network in a supervised manner to map out the quantum phase diagram of disordered topological superconductor in class DIII. Given the disorder that keeps the discrete symmetries of the ensemble as a whole, translational symmetry which is broken in the quasiparticle distribution individually is recovered statistically by taking an ensemble average. By using this, we classify the phases by the artificial neural network that learned the quasiparticle distribution in the clean limit, and show that the result is totally consistent with the calculation …
We combine numerical diagonalization with a semi-analytical calculations to prove the existence of the intermediate non-ergodic but delocalized phase in the Anderson model on disordered hierarchical lattices. We suggest a new generalized population dynamics that is able to detect the violation of ergodicity of the delocalized states within the Abou-Chakra, Anderson and Thouless recursive scheme. This result is supplemented by statistics of random wave functions extracted from exact diagonalization of the Anderson model on ensemble of disordered Random Regular Graphs (RRG) of N sites with the c…
Characterizing states of matter through the lens of their ergodic properties is a fascinating new direction of research. In the quantum realm, the many-body localization (MBL) was proposed to be the paradigmatic ergodicity breaking phenomenon, which extends the concept of Anderson localization to interacting systems. At the same time, random matrix theory has established a powerful framework for characterizing the onset of quantum chaos and ergodicity (or the absence thereof) in quantum many-body systems. Here we numerically study the spectral statistics of disordered interacting spin chains, …
Local diffusion coefficients in disordered systems such as spin glass systems and living cells are highly heterogeneous and may change over time. Such a time-dependent and spatially heterogeneous environment results in irreproducibility of single-particle-tracking measurements. Irreproducibility of time-averaged observables has been theoretically studied in the context of weak ergodicity breaking in stochastic processes. Here, we provide rigorous descriptions of equilibrium and non-equilibrium diffusion processes for the annealed transit time model, which is a heterogeneous diffusion model in …
We study the learning dynamics of agents who adapt to heterogeneous comfort levels in the context of an El-Farol type game, and show that even an infinitesimal degree of heterogeneity in the resource levels leads to a significant reduction of the fluctuations of the collective action, and removes the phase transition observed in models with homogeneous comfort level. Our analysis is based on dynamical methods of disordered systems theory, in particular on a generating functional approach, and confirmed by numerical experiments. We also report on simulations of a system in which the comfort lev…
A random walk is performed over a disordered media composed of $N$ sites random and uniformly distributed inside a $d$-dimensional hypercube. The walker cannot remain in the same site and hops to one of its $n$ neighboring sites with a transition probability that depends on the distance $D$ between sites according to a cost function $E(D)$. The stochasticity level is parametrized by a formal temperature $T$. In the case $T = 0$, the walk is deterministic and ergodicity is broken: the phase space is divided in a ${\cal O}(N)$ number of attractor basins of two-cycles that trap the walker. For $d…
The versatility of renewal theory is owed to its abstract formulation. Renewals can be interpreted as steps of a random walk, switching events in two-state models, domain crossings of a random motion, etc. We here discuss a renewal process in which successive events are separated by scale-free waiting time periods. Among other ubiquitous long time properties, this process exhibits aging: events counted initially in a time interval [0,t] statistically strongly differ from those observed at later times [t_a,t_a+t]. In complex, disordered media, processes with scale-free waiting times play a part…
We numerically investigate a lattice regularized version of quantum electrodynamics in one spatial dimension (Schwinger model). We work at a density where lattice commensuration effects are important, and preclude analytic solution of the problem by bosonization. We therefore numerically investigate the interplay of confinement, lattice commensuration, and disorder, in the form of a random chemical potential. We begin by pointing out that the ground state at commensurate filling spontaneously breaks the translational symmetry of the lattice. This feature is absent in the conventional lattice r…
