Many-body localization: construction of the emergent local conserved operators via block real-space renormalization

A fully many-body localized (FMBL) quantum disordered system is characterized by the emergence of an extensive number of local conserved operators that prevents the relaxation towards thermal equilibrium. These local conserved operators can be seen as the building blocks of the whole set of eigenstates. In this paper, we propose to construct them explicitly via block real-space renormalization. The principle is that each renormalization group step diagonalizes the smallest remaining blocks and produces a conserved operator for each block. The final output for a chain of N spins is a hierarchical organization of the N conserved operators with $\left(\frac{\ln N}{\ln 2}\right)$ layers. The system size nature of the conserved operators of the top layers is necessary to describe the possible long-range order of the excited eigenstates and the possible critical points between different FMBL phases. We discuss the similarities and the differences with the strong disorder RSRG-X method that generates the whole set of the 2^N eigenstates via a binary tree of N layers. The approach is applied to the long-range quantum spin-glass Ising model, where the constructed excited eigenstates are found to be exactly like ground states in another disorder realization, so that they can be either in the paramagnetic phase, in the spin-glass phase or critical. (paper: quantum statistical physics, condensed matter, integrable systems)