Absence of many-body localization in a continuum

We show that many-body localization, which exists in tight-binding models, is unstable in a continuum. Irrespective of the dimensionality of the system, many-body localization does not survive the unbounded growth of the single-particle localization length with increasing energy that is characteristic of the continuum limit. The system remains delocalized down to arbitrarily small temperature T, although its dynamics slows down as T decreases. Remarkably, the conductivity vanishes with decreasing T faster than in the Arrhenius law. The system can be characterized by an effective T-dependent single-particle mobility edge which diverges in the limit of T→ 0. Delocalization is driven by interactions between hot electrons above the mobility edge and the "bath" of thermal electrons in the vicinity of the Fermi level.