No Arabic abstract
We introduce a clean cluster spin chain coupled to fully interacting spinless fermions, forming an unconstrained Z2 lattice gauge theory (LGT) which possesses dynamical proximity effect controlled by the entanglement structure of the initial state. We expand the machinery of interaction-driven localization to the realm of LGTs such that for any starting product state, the matter fields exhibits emergent statistical bubble localization, which is driven solely by the cluster interaction, having no topologically trivial non-interacting peer, and thus is of pure dynamical many-body effect. In this vein, our proposed setting provides possibly the minimal model dropping all the conventional assumptions regarding the existence of many-body localization. Through projective measurement of local constituting species, we also identify the coexistence of the disentangled nonergodic matter and thermalized gauge degrees of freedom which stands completely beyond the standard established phenomenology of quantum disentangled liquids. As a by product of self-localization of the proximate fermions, the spin subsystem hosts the long-lived topological edge zero modes, which are dynamically decoupled from the thermalized background Z2 charges of the bulk, and hence remains cold at arbitrary high-energy density. This provides a convenient platform for strong protection of the quantum bits of information which are embedded at the edges of completely ergodic sub-system; the phenomenon that in the absence of such proximity-induced self-localization could, at best, come about with a pre-thermal manner in translational invariant systems. Finally, by breaking local Z2 symmetry of the model, we argue that such admixture of particles no longer remains disentangled and the ergodic gauge degrees of freedom act as a small bath coupled to the localized components.
We uncover a novel mechanism for inducing a gapful phase in interacting many-body quantum chains. The mechanism is nonperturbative, being triggered only in the presence of both strong interactions and strong aperiodic (disordered) modulation. In the context of the critical antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 XXZ chain, we identify an emerging dimerization which removes the system from criticality and stabilizes the novel phase. This mechanism is shown to be quite general in strongly interacting quantum chains in the presence of strongly modulated quasiperiodic disorder which is, surprisingly, perturbatively irrelevant. Finally, we also characterize the associated quantum phase transition via the corresponding critical exponents and thermodynamic properties.
Certain disorder-free Hamiltonians can be non-ergodic due to a emph{strong fragmentation} of the Hilbert space into disconnected sectors. Here, we characterize such systems by introducing the notion of `statistically localized integrals of motion (SLIOM), whose eigenvalues label the connected components of the Hilbert space. SLIOMs are not spatially localized in the operator sense, but appear localized to sub-extensive regions when their expectation value is taken in typical states with a finite density of particles. We illustrate this general concept on several Hamiltonians, both with and without dipole conservation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there exist perturbations which destroy these integrals of motion in the bulk of the system, while keeping them on the boundary. This results in statistically localized emph{strong zero modes}, leading to infinitely long-lived edge magnetizations along with a thermalizing bulk, constituting the first example of such strong edge modes in a non-integrable model. We also show that in a particular example, these edge modes lead to the appearance of topological string order in a certain subset of highly excited eigenstates. Some of our suggested models can be realized in Rydberg quantum simulators.
We consider fermionic systems in which fermion parity is conserved within rigid subsystems, and describe an explicit procedure for gauging such subsystem fermion parity symmetries to obtain bosonic spin Hamiltonians. We show that gauging planar or fractal subsystem fermion parity symmetry in three spatial dimensions gives rise to a plethora of exactly solvable spin models exhibiting novel gapped fractonic orders characterized by emergent fermionic gauge theory. The low energy excitations of these models include fractional quasiparticles with constrained mobility and emergent fermionic statistics. We illustrate this phenomenon through a series of examples including fermionic analogs of both foliated fracton phases and fractal spin liquids. We find that the foliated analogs actually exhibit the same fractonic order as their bosonic counterparts, while this is not generally the case for fermionic fractal spin liquids.
We study the energy and entanglement dynamics of $(1+1)$D conformal field theories (CFTs) under a Floquet drive with the sine-square deformed (SSD) Hamiltonian. Previous work has shown this model supports both a non-heating and a heating phase. Here we analytically establish several robust and `super-universal features of the heating phase which rely on conformal invariance but not on the details of the CFT involved. First, we show the energy density is concentrated in two peaks in real space, a chiral and anti-chiral peak, which leads to an exponential growth in the total energy. The peak locations are set by fixed points of the Mobius transformation. Second, all of the quantum entanglement is shared between these two peaks. In each driving period, a number of Bell pairs are generated, with one member pumped to the chiral peak, and the other member pumped to the anti-chiral peak. These Bell pairs are localized and accumulate at these two peaks, and can serve as a source of quantum entanglement. Third, in both the heating and non-heating phases we find that the total energy is related to the half system entanglement entropy by a simple relation $E(t)propto c exp left( frac{6}{c}S(t) right)$ with $c$ being the central charge. In addition, we show that the non-heating phase, in which the energy and entanglement oscillate in time, is unstable to small fluctuations of the driving frequency in contrast to the heating phase. Finally, we point out an analogy to the periodically driven harmonic oscillator which allows us to understand global features of the phases, and introduce a quasiparticle picture to explain the spatial structure, which can be generalized to setups beyond the SSD construction.
We demonstrate several explicit duality mappings between elasticity of two-dimensional crystals and fracton tensor gauge theories, expanding on recent works by two of the present authors. We begin by dualizing the quantum elasticity theory of an ordinary commensurate crystal, which maps directly onto a fracton tensor gauge theory, in a natural tensor analogue of the conventional particle-vortex duality transformation of a superfluid. The transverse and longitudinal phonons of a crystal map onto the two gapless gauge modes of the tensor gauge theory, while the topological lattice defects map onto the gauge charges, with disclinations corresponding to isolated fractons and dislocations corresponding to dipoles of fractons. We use the classical limit of this duality to make new predictions for the finite-temperature phase diagram of fracton models, and provide a simpler derivation of the Halperin-Nelson-Young theory of thermal melting of two-dimensional solids. We extend this duality to incorporate bosonic statistics, which is necessary for a description of the quantum melting transitions. We thereby derive a hybrid vector-tensor gauge theory which describes a supersolid phase, hosting both crystalline and superfluid orders. The structure of this gauge theory puts constraints on the quantum phase diagram of bosons, and also leads to the concept of symmetry enriched fracton order. We formulate the extension of these dualities to systems breaking time-reversal symmetry. We also discuss the broader implications of these dualities, such as a possible connection between fracton phases and the study of interacting topological crystalline insulators.