Multifractal Orthogonality Catastrophe in 1D Random Quantum Critical Points

Abstract

We study the response of random singlet quantum critical points to local perturbations. Despite being insulating, these systems are dramatically affected by a local cut in the system, so that the overlap $G=\left|\langle \Psi_B |\Psi_A \rangle\right|$ of the groundstate wave functions with and without a cut vanishes algebraically in the thermodynamic limit. We analyze this Anderson orthogonality catastrophe in detail using a real-space renormalization group approach. We show that both the typical value of the overlap G and the disorder average of $G^\alpha$ with $\alpha>0$ decay as power-laws of the system size. In particular, the disorder average of $G^\alpha$ shows a "multifractal" behavior, with a non-trivial limit $\alpha \to \infty$ that is dominated by rare events. We also discuss the case of more generic local perturbations and generalize these results to local quantum quenches.