Extreme statistics of the excitations in the random transverse Ising chain

Abstract

In random quantum magnets, like the random transverse Ising chain, low energy excitations are localized in rare regions and there are only weak correlations between them. It is an open question whether these correlations are relevant in the sense of the renormalization group. To answer this question, we calculate the distribution of the excitation energy of the random transverse Ising chain in the disordered Griffiths phase with high numerical precision by the strong disorder renormalization group method and—for shorter chains—by free-fermion techniques. Asymptotically, the two methods give identical results, which are well fitted by the Fréchet limit law of the extremes of independent and identically distributed random numbers. Considering the finite size corrections, the two numerical methods give very similar results, but these differ from the correction term for uncorrelated random variables, indicating that the weak correlations between low-energy excitations in random quantum magnets are relevant.