Noninteracting fermions in one dimension can undergo a localization-delocalization transition in the presence of a quasiperiodic potential as a function of that potential. In the presence of interactions, this transition transforms into a many-body localization (MBL) transition. Recent studies have suggested that this type of transition can also occur in models with quasiperiodic potentials that possess single-particle mobility edges. Two such models were studied by Modak and Mukerjee [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 230401 (2015)] but only one was found to exhibit an MBL transition in the presence of interactions while the other one did not. In this work we investigate the occurrence of MBL in the presence of weak interactions in five different models with single-particle mobility edges in one dimension with a view to obtaining a criterion for the same. We find that not all such models undergo a thermal-MBL phase transition in the presence of weak interactions. We propose a criterion to determine whether MBL is likely to occur in the presence of interaction based only on the properties of the noninteracting models. The relevant quantity $\epsilon$ is a measure of how localized the localized states are relative to how delocalized the delocalized states are in the noninteracting model. We also study various other features of the noninteracting models such as the divergence of the localization length at the mobility edge and the presence or absence of “ergodicity” and localization in their many-body eigenstates. However, we find that these features cannot be used to predict the occurrence of MBL upon the introduction of weak interactions.

• Received 16 February 2016
• Revised 22 December 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.97.104204