Structure of typical states of a disordered Richardson model and many-body localization

We present a thorough numerical study of the Richardson model with quenched disorder (a fully connected XX model with longitudinal random fields). We find that for any value of the interaction the eigenstates occupy an exponential number of sites on the unperturbed Fock space but that single-spin observables do not thermalize, as tested by a microcanonical version of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter. We therefore do not observe many-body localization in this model. We find a relation between the inverse participation ratio and the average Hamming distance between spin configurations covered by a typical eigenstate for which we hypothesize a remarkably simple form for the thermodynamic limit. We also studied the random process defined by the spread of a typical eigenstate on configuration space, highlighting several similarities with hopping on percolated hypercube, a process used to mimic the slow relaxation of spin glasses. A nearby nonintegrable model is also considered where delocalization is instead observed, although the presence of a phase transition at infinite temperature is questionable.