No Arabic abstract
Although most quantum systems thermalize locally on short time scales independent of initial conditions, recent developments have shown this is not always the case. Lattice geometry and quantum mechanics can conspire to produce constrained quantum dynamics and associated glassy behavior, a phenomenon that falls outside the rubric of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Constraints fragment the many-body Hilbert space due to which some states remain insulated from others and the system fails to attain thermal equilibrium. Such fragmentation is a hallmark of geometrically frustrated magnets with low-energy icelike manifolds exhibiting a broad range of relaxation times for different initial states. Focusing on the highly frustrated kagome lattice, we demonstrate these phenomena in the Balents-Fisher-Girvin Hamiltonian (easy-axis regime), and a three-coloring model (easy-plane regime), both with constrained Hilbert spaces. We study their level statistics and relaxation dynamics to develop a coherent picture of fragmentation in various limits of the XXZ model on the kagome lattice.
We consider a 2D quantum spin model with ring-exchange interaction that has subsystem symmetries associated to conserved magnetization along rows and columns of a square lattice, which implies the conservation of the global dipole moment. In a certain regime, the model is non-integrable, but violates the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis through an extensive Hilbert space fragmentation, including an exponential number of inert subsectors with trivial dynamics, arising from kinetic constraints. While subsystem symmetries are quite restrictive for the dynamics, we show that they alone cannot account for such a number of inert states, even with infinite-range interactions. We present a procedure for constructing shielding structures that can separate and disentangle dynamically active regions from each other. Notably, subsystem symmetries allow the thickness of the shields to be dependent only on the interaction range rather than on the size of the active regions, unlike in the case of generic dipole-conserving systems.
We study one-dimensional spin-1/2 models in which strict confinement of Ising domain walls leads to the fragmentation of Hilbert space into exponentially many disconnected subspaces. Whereas most previous works emphasize dipole moment conservation as an essential ingredient for such fragmentation, we instead require two commuting U(1) conserved quantities associated with the total domain-wall number and the total magnetization. The latter arises naturally from the confinement of domain walls. Remarkably, while some connected components of the Hilbert space thermalize, others are integrable by Bethe ansatz. We further demonstrate how this Hilbert-space fragmentation pattern arises perturbatively in the confining limit of $mathbb{Z}_2$ gauge theory coupled to fermionic matter, leading to a hierarchy of time scales for motion of the fermions. This model can be realized experimentally in two complementary settings.
Motivated by previous works on a Floquet version of the PXP model [Mukherjee {it et al.} Phys. Rev. B 102, 075123 (2020), Mukherjee {it et al.} Phys. Rev. B 101, 245107 (2020)], we study a one-dimensional spin-$1/2$ lattice model with three-spin interactions in the same constrained Hilbert space (where all configurations with two adjacent $S^z=uparrow$ spins are excluded). We show that this model possesses an extensive fragmentation of the Hilbert space which leads to a breakdown of thermalization upon unitary evolution starting from a large class of simple initial states. Despite the non-integrable nature of the Hamiltonian, many of its high-energy eigenstates admit a quasiparticle description. A class of these, which we dub as bubble eigenstates, have integer eigenvalues (including mid-spectrum zero modes) and strictly localized quasiparticles while another class contains mobile quasiparticles leading to a dispersion in momentum space. Other anomalous eigenstates that arise due to a {it secondary} fragmentation mechanism, including those that lead to flat bands in momentum space due to destructive quantum interference, are also discussed. The consequences of adding a (non-commuting) staggered magnetic field and a PXP term respectively to this model, where the former preserves the Hilbert space fragmentation while the latter destroys it, are discussed. A Floquet version with time-dependent staggered field also evades thermalization with additional features like freezing of exponentially many states at special drive frequencies. Finally, we map the model to a $U(1)$ lattice gauge theory coupled to dynamical fermions and discuss the interpretation of some of these anomalous states in this language. A class of gauge-invariant states show reduced mobility of the elementary charged excitations with only certain charge-neutral objects being mobile suggesting a connection to fractons.
We expand the concept of frustration in Mott insulators and quantum spin liquids to metals with flat bands. We show that when inter-orbital hopping $t_2$ dominates over intra-orbital hopping $t_1$, in a multiband system with strong spin-orbit coupling $lambda$, electronic states with a narrow bandwidth $Wsim t_2^2/lambda$ are formed compared to a bandwidth of order $t_1$ for intra-orbital hopping. We demonstrate the evolution of the electronic structure, Berry phase distributions for time-reversal and inversion breaking cases, and their imprint on the optical absorption, in a tight binding model of $d$-orbital hopping on a honeycomb lattice. Going beyond quantum Hall effect and twisted bilayer graphene, we provide an alternative mechanism and a richer materials platform for achieving flat bands poised at the brink of instabilities toward novel correlated and fractionalized metallic phases.
By using a state of art tensor network state method, we study the ground-state phase diagram of an extended Bose-Hubbard model on the square lattice with frustrated next-nearest neighboring tunneling. In the hardcore limit, tunneling frustration stabilizes a peculiar half supersolid (HSS) phase with one sublattice being superfluid and the other sublattice being Mott Insulator away from half filling. In the softcore case, the model shows very rich phase diagrams above half filling, including three different types of supersolid phases depending on the interaction parameters. The considered model provides a promising route to experimentally search for novel stable supersolid state induced by frustrated tunneling in below half filling region with dipolar atoms or molecules.