Critical properties of the ground-state localization-delocalization transition in the many-particle Aubry-Andre model

As opposed to random disorder, which localizes single-particle wave functions in one dimension (1D) at arbitrarily small disorder strengths, there is a localization-delocalization transition for quasiperiodic disorder in the 1D Aubry-Andre model at a finite disorder strength. On the single-particle level, many properties of the ground state at criticality have been revealed by applying a real-space renormalization-group scheme; the critical properties are determined solely by the continued-fraction expansion of the incommensurate frequency of the disorder. Here, we investigate the many-particle localization-delocalization transition in the Aubry-Andre model with and without interactions. In contrast to the single-particle case, we find that the critical exponents depend on a Diophantine equation relating the incommensurate frequency of the disorder and the filling fraction which generalizes the dependence, in the single-particle spectrum, on the continued-fraction expansion of the incommensurate frequency. This equation can be viewed as a generalization of the resonance condition in the commensurate case. When interactions are included, numerical evidence suggests that interactions may be irrelevant at at least some of these critical points, meaning that the critical exponent relations obtained from the Diophantine equation may actually survive in the interacting case.