Transport properties of one-dimensional interacting fermions in aperiodic potentials

Abstract

Motivated by the existence of metal-insulator transition in one-dimensional non-interacting fermions in quasiperiodic and pseudorandom potentials, we studied interacting spinless fermion models using exact many-body Lanczos diagonalization techniques. Our main focus was to understand the effect of the fermion-fermion interaction on the transport properties of aperiodic systems. We calculated the ground state energy and the Kohn charge stiffness Dc. Our numerical results indicate that there exists a region in the interaction strength parameter space where the system may behave differently from the metallic and insulating phases. This intermediate phase may be characterized by a power law scaling of the charge stiffness constant in contrast to the localized phase where Dc scales exponentially with the size of the system.