- Letter
Metal-insulator transition in infinitesimally weakly disordered flat bands
Phys. Rev. B 104, L180201 – Published 15 November, 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.104.L180201
Abstract
We study the effect of infinitesimal onsite disorder on -dimensional all bands flat lattices. The lattices are generated from diagonal Hamiltonians by a sequence of local unitary transformations parametrized by angles . Without loss of generality, we consider the case of two flat bands separated by a finite gap, . The perturbed states originating from the flat bands are described by an effective tight-binding network with finite on- and off-diagonal disorder strength which depends on the manifold angles . The original infinitesimal on-site disorder strength is only affecting the overall scale of the effective Hamiltonian. Upon variation of the manifold angles for and we find that localization persists for any choice of local unitaries, and the localization length can be maximized for specific values of . Instead, in we identify a nonperturbative metal-insulator transition upon varying all bands' flat manifold angles.