No Arabic abstract
A quantum scar - an enhancement of a quantum probability density in the vicinity of a classical periodic orbit - is a fundamental phenomenon connecting quantum and classical mechanics. Here we demonstrate that some of the eigenstates of the perturbed two-dimensional anisotropic (elliptic) harmonic oscillator are strongly scarred by the Lissajous orbits of the unperturbed classical counterpart. In particular, we show that the occurrence and geometry of these quantum Lissajous scars are connected to the anisotropy of the harmonic confinement, but unlike the classical Lissajous orbits the scars survive under a small perturbation of the potential. This Lissajous scarring is caused by the combined effect of the quantum (near) degeneracies in the unperturbed system and the localized character of the perturbation. Furthermore, we discuss experimental schemes to observe this perturbation-induced scarring.
The control of many-body quantum dynamics in complex systems is a key challenge in the quest to reliably produce and manipulate large-scale quantum entangled states. Recently, quench experiments in Rydberg atom arrays (Bluvstein et. al., arXiv:2012.12276) demonstrated that coherent revivals associated with quantum many-body scars can be stabilized by periodic driving, generating stable subharmonic responses over a wide parameter regime. We analyze a simple, related model where these phenomena originate from spatiotemporal ordering in an effective Floquet unitary, corresponding to discrete time-crystalline (DTC) behavior in a prethermal regime. Unlike conventional DTC, the subharmonic response exists only for Neel-like initial states, associated with quantum scars. We predict robustness to perturbations and identify emergent timescales that could be observed in future experiments. Our results suggest a route to controlling entanglement in interacting quantum systems by combining periodic driving with many-body scars.
Certain wave functions of non-interacting quantum chaotic systems can exhibit scars in the fabric of their real-space density profile. Quantum scarred wave functions concentrate in the vicinity of unstable periodic classical trajectories. We introduce the notion of many-body quantum scars which reflect the existence of a subset of special many-body eigenstates concentrated in certain parts of the Hilbert space. We demonstrate the existence of scars in the Fibonacci chain -- the one- dimensional model with a constrained local Hilbert space realized in the 51 Rydberg atom quantum simulator [H. Bernien et al., arXiv:1707.04344]. The quantum scarred eigenstates are embedded throughout the thermalizing many-body spectrum, but surprisingly lead to direct experimental signatures such as robust oscillations following a quench from a charge-density wave state found in experiment. We develop a model based on a single particle hopping on the Hilbert space graph, which quantitatively captures the scarred wave functions up to large systems of L = 32 atoms. Our results suggest that scarred many-body bands give rise to a new universality class of quantum dynamics, which opens up opportunities for creating and manipulating novel states with long-lived coherence in systems that are now amenable to experimental study.
We investigate the emergence of quantum scars in a general ensemble of random Hamiltonians (of which the PXP is a particular realization), that we refer to as quantum local random networks. We find two types of scars, that we call stochastic and statistical. We identify specific signatures of the localized nature of these eigenstates by analyzing a combination of indicators of quantum ergodicity and properties related to the network structure of the model. Within this parallelism, we associate the emergence of statistical scars to the presence of motifs in the network, that reflects how these are associated to links with anomalously small connectivity (as measured, e.g., by their betweenness). Most remarkably, statistical scars appear at well-defined values of energy, predicted solely on the base of network theory. We study the scaling of the number of statistical scars with system size: below a threshold connectivity, we find that the number of statistical scars increases with system size. This allows to the define the concept of statistical stability of quantum scars.
Here we present a protocol for generating Lissajous curves with a trapped ion by engineering Rashba- and the Dresselhaus-type spin-orbit interactions in a Paul trap. The unique anisotropic Rashba $alpha_{x}$, $alpha_{y}$ and Dresselhaus $beta_{x}$, $beta_{y}$ couplings afforded by our setup also enables us to obtain an unusual Zitterbewegung, i.e., the semiconductor analog of the relativistic trembling motion of electrons, with cycloidal trajectories in the absence of magnetic fields. We have also introduced bounded SO interactions, confined to an upper-bound vibrational subspace of the Fock states, as an additional mechanism to manipulate the Lissajous motion of the trapped ion. Finally, we accounted for dissipative effects on the vibrational degrees of freedom of the ion and find that the Lissajous trajectories are still robust and well defined for realistic parameters.
We study weak ergodicity breaking in a one-dimensional, nonintegrable spin-1 XY model. We construct for it an exact, highly excited eigenstate, which despite its large energy density, can be represented analytically by a finite bond-dimension matrix product state (MPS) with area-law entanglement. Upon a quench to a finite Zeeman field, the state undergoes periodic dynamics with perfect many-body revivals, in stark contrast to other generic initial states which instead rapidly thermalize. This dynamics can be completely understood in terms of the evolution of entangled virtual spin-1/2 degrees of freedom, which in turn underpin the presence of an extensive tower of strong-eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH)-violating many-body eigenstates. The resulting quantum many-body scars are therefore of novel origin. Our results provide important analytical insights into the nature and entanglement structure of quantum many-body scars.