Multifractality in the interacting disordered Tavis-Cummings model

Abstract

We analyze the spectral and transport properties of the interacting disordered Tavis-Cummings model at half excitation filling. We demonstrate that a Poissonian level statistics coexists with eigenfunctions that are multifractal (extended, but non-ergodic) in the Hilbert space, for all strengths of light-matter interactions. This is associated with a lack of thermalization for a local perturbation. We find that the bipartite entanglement entropy grows logarithmically with time, similarly to many-body localized systems, while the spin imbalance tends to zero for strong coupling, in analogy to ergodic phases. We show that these effects are due to the combination of finite interactions and integrability of the model. When a small integrability-breaking perturbation (nearest-neighbor hopping) is introduced, typical eigenfunctions become ergodic, seemingly turning the system into a near-perfect conductor, contrary to the single-excitation noninteracting case. We propose a realization of this model with cold atoms.