Many-body localization: stability and instability

Rare regions with weak disorder (Griffiths regions) have the potential to spoil localization. We describe a non-perturbative construction of local integrals of motion (LIOMs) for a weakly interacting spin chain in one dimension, under a physically reasonable assumption on the statistics of eigenvalues. We discuss ideas about the situation in higher dimensions, where one can no longer ensure that interactions involving the Griffiths regions are much smaller than the typical energy-level spacing for such regions. We argue that ergodicity is restored in dimension d >1, although equilibration should be extremely slow, similar to the dynamics of glasses. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Breakdown of ergodicity in quantum systems: from solids to synthetic matter’.