Pair localization in dipolar systems with tunable positional disorder

Abstract: Strongly interacting quantum systems subject to quenched disorder exhibit intriguing phenomena such as glassiness and many-body localization. Theoretical studies have mainly focused on disorder in the form of random potentials, while many experimental realizations naturally feature disorder in the interparticle interactions. Inspired by cold Rydberg gases, where such disorder can be engineered using the dipole blockade effect,we study a Heisenberg XXZ spin model where the disorder is exclusively due to random spin-spin couplings, arising from power-law interactions between randomly positioned spins. Using established spectral and eigenstate properties and entanglement entropy, we show that this system exhibits a localization crossover and identify strongly interacting pairs as emergent local conserved quantities in the system, leading to an intuitive physical picture consistent with our numerical results.