Many-body localization in spin chains with long-range transverse interactions: Scaling of critical disorder with system size

We investigate many-body localization in the chain of interacting spins with a transverse power-law interaction, J(0)/r(alpha), and random on-site potentials, phi(i) is an element of (-W/2, W/2), in the long-range limit, alpha < 3/2, which has been recently examined experimentally on trapped ions. The many-body localization threshold is characterized by the critical disordering, W-c, which separates localized (W > W-c) and chaotic (W < W-c) phases. Using the analysis of the instability of localized states with respect to resonant interactions complemented by numerical finite-size scaling, we show that the critical disordering scales with the number of spins, N, as W-c approximate to [1.37J(0)/(4/3 - alpha)]N4/3-alpha ln N for 0 < alpha <= 1, and as W-c approximate to [J(0)/(1 - 2 alpha/3)]N(1-2 alpha/3 )ln(2/3) N for 1 < alpha < 3/2, while the transition width scales as sigma(w) proportional to W-c/N. We use this result to predict the spin long-term evolution for a very large number of spins (N = 50), inaccessible for exact diagonalization, and to suggest the rescaling of hopping interaction with the system size to attain the localization transition at finite disordering in the thermodynamic limit of infinite number of spins.