Characterizing many-body localization via state sensitivity to boundary conditions

We introduce characterizations for many-body phase transitions between delocalized and localized phases based on the system's sensitivity to boundary conditions. In particular, we change boundary conditions from periodic to antiperiodic and calculate a shift in the system's energy and shifts in the single-particle density-matrix eigenvalues in the corresponding energy window. We employ the typical model for studying MBL, a one-dimensional disordered system of fermions with nearest-neighbor repulsive interaction where disorder is introduced as randomness on on-site energies. By calculating numerically the shifts in the system's energy and eigenvalues of the single-particle density matrix, we observe that in the localized regime, both shifts are vanishing; while in the extended regime, both shifts are on the order of the corresponding level spacing. We also applied these characterizations of the phase transition to the case of having next-nearest-neighbor interactions in addition to the nearest-neighbor interactions and studied its effect on the transition.