Orbital cancellation and reentrant localization in a quasiperiodic trimer ladder

Abstract

Uniform orbital detuning can restore spatial extent even as quasiperiodic modulation strengthens. In a trimer ladder with fixed hoppings and orbital modulation signs, increasing detuning and modulation amplitude together drives successive avoided crossings that redistribute orbital weights, suppressing the projected onsite potential in both lower molecular bands while leaving the third strongly modulated. Complete-band participation scaling supports two reentrant high-participation windows, with wave-packet propagation corroborating spatial recovery at representative controls over the studied sizes and times. These diagonal cancellations leave residual interband modulation, which generates a self-energy whose magnitude depends on the molecular level separation. Gaussian quadrature improves convergence of closed-walk determinant estimates used to cross-check energy-resolved attenuation. Comparing the coupled and decoupled ladders under the same finite-size participation criterion shows that restoring the full off-diagonal modulation narrows both sampled windows, with a larger absolute contraction of the second.