Shielding and localization in the presence of long-range hopping

Abstract

We investigate a paradigmatic model for quantum transport with both nearest-neighbor and infinite-range hopping coupling (independent of the position). Due to long-range homogeneous hopping, a gap between the ground state and the excited states can be induced, which is mathematically equivalent to the superconducting gap. In the gapped regime, the dynamics within the excited-state subspace is shielded from long-range hopping, namely it occurs as if long-range hopping would be absent. This is a cooperative phenomenon since shielding is effective over a time scale that diverges with the system size.We named this effect cooperative shielding.We also discuss the consequences of our findings on Anderson localization. Long-range hopping is usually thought to destroy localization due to the fact that it induces an infinite number of resonances. Contrary to this common lore we show that the excited states display strong localized features when shielding is effective even in the regime of strong long-range coupling. A brief discussion on the extension of our results to generic power-law decaying long-range hopping is also given. Our preliminary results confirm that the effects found for the infinite-range case are generic. ©2016 American Physical Society