No Arabic abstract
Non-equilibrium properties of quantum materials present many intriguing properties, among them athermal behavior, which violates the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Such behavior has primarily been observed in disordered systems. More recently, experimental and theoretical evidence for athermal eigenstates, known as quantum scars has emerged in non-integrable disorder-free models in one dimension with constrained dynamics. In this work, we show the existence of quantum scar eigenstates and investigate their dynamical properties in many simple two-body Hamiltonians with staggered interactions, involving ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic motifs, in arbitrary dimensions. These magnetic models include simple modifications of widely studied ones (e.g., the XXZ model) on a variety of frustrated and unfrustrated lattices. We demonstrate our ideas by focusing on the two dimensional frustrated spin-1/2 kagome antiferromagnet, which was previously shown to harbor a special exactly solvable point with three-coloring ground states in its phase diagram. For appropriately chosen initial product states -- for example, those which correspond to any state of valid three-colors -- we show the presence of robust quantum revivals, which survive the addition of anisotropic terms. We also suggest avenues for future experiments which may see this effect in real materials.
The discovery of Quantum Many-Body Scars (QMBS) both in Rydberg atom simulators and in the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) spin-1 chain model, have shown that a weak violation of ergodicity can still lead to rich experimental and theoretical physics. In this review, we provide a pedagogical introduction to and an overview of the exact results on weak ergodicity breaking via QMBS in isolated quantum systems with the help of simple examples such as the fermionic Hubbard model. We also discuss various mechanisms and unifying formalisms that have been proposed to encompass the plethora of systems exhibiting QMBS. We cover examples of equally-spaced towers that lead to exact revivals for particular initial states, as well as isolated examples of QMBS. Finally, we review Hilbert Space Fragmentation, a related phenomenon where systems exhibit a richer variety of ergodic and non-ergodic behaviors, and discuss its connections to QMBS.
We revisit the $eta$-pairing states in Hubbard models and explore their connections to quantum many-body scars to discover a universal scars mechanism. $eta$-pairing occurs due to an algebraic structure known as a Spectrum Generating Algebra (SGA), giving rise to equally spaced towers of eigenstates in the spectrum. We generalize the original $eta$-pairing construction and show that several Hubbard-like models on arbitrary graphs exhibit SGAs, including ones with disorder and spin-orbit coupling. We further define a Restricted Spectrum Generating Algebra (RSGA) and give examples of perturbations to the Hubbard-like models that preserve an equally spaced tower of the original model as eigenstates. The states of the surviving tower exhibit a sub-thermal entanglement entropy, and we analytically obtain parameter regimes for which they lie in the bulk of the spectrum, showing that they are exact quantum many-body scars. The RSGA framework also explains the equally spaced towers of eigenstates in several well-known models of quantum scars, including the AKLT model.
We present an interpretation of scar states and quantum revivals as weakly broken representations of Lie algebras spanned by a subset of eigenstates of a many-body quantum system. We show that the PXP model, describing strongly-interacting Rydberg atoms, supports a loose embedding of multiple $mathrm{su(2)}$ Lie algebras corresponding to distinct families of scarred eigenstates. Moreover, we demonstrate that these embeddings can be made progressively more accurate via an iterative process which results in optimal perturbations that stabilize revivals from arbitrary charge density wave product states, $|mathbb{Z}_nrangle$, including ones that show no revivals in the unperturbed PXP model. We discuss the relation between the loose embeddings of Lie algebras present in the PXP model and recent exact constructions of scarred states in related models.
We study a kinetically constrained pair hopping model that arises within a Landau level in the quantum Hall effect. At filling $ u = 1/3$, the model exactly maps onto the so-called PXP model, a constrained model for the Rydberg atom chain that is numerically known to exhibit ETH-violating states in the middle of the spectrum or quantum many-body scars. Indeed, particular charge density wave configurations exhibit the same revivals seen in the PXP model. We generalize the mapping to fillings factors $ u = p/(2p+1)$, and show that the model is equivalent to non-integrable spin-chains within particular constrained Krylov Hilbert spaces. These lead to new examples of quantum many-body scars which manifest as revivals and slow thermalization of particular charge density wave states. Finally, we investigate the stability of the quantum scars under certain Hamiltonian perturbations motivated by the fractional quantum Hall physics.
We study the spin-1 XY model on a hypercubic lattice in $d$ dimensions and show that this well-known nonintegrable model hosts an extensive set of anomalous finite-energy-density eigenstates with remarkable properties. Namely, they exhibit subextensive entanglement entropy and spatiotemporal long-range order, both believed to be impossible in typical highly excited eigenstates of nonintegrable quantum many-body systems. While generic initial states are expected to thermalize, we show analytically that the eigenstates we construct lead to weak ergodicity breaking in the form of persistent oscillations of local observables following certain quantum quenches--in other words, these eigenstates provide an archetypal example of so-called quantum many-body scars. This work opens the door to the analytical study of the microscopic origin, dynamical signatures, and stability of such phenomena.