  The many-body localization (MBL) phase transition is not a conventional
thermodynamic phase transition. Thus to define the phase transition one should
allow the possibility of taking the limit of an infinite system in a way that
is not the conventional thermodynamic limit. We explore this for the so-called
"avalanche" instability due to rare thermalizing regions in the MBL phase for
quenched-random systems in more than one spatial dimension, finding an
unconventional way of scaling the systems so that they do have a type of phase
transition. These arguments suggest that the MBL phase transition in systems
with short-range interactions in more than one dimension is a transition where
entanglement in the eigenstates begins to spread in to some typical regions:
the transition is set by when the avalanches start. Once this entanglement gets
started, the system does thermalize. From this point of view, the much-studied
case of one-dimensional MBL with short-range interactions is a special case
with a different, and in some ways more conventional, type of phase transition.
