Quantum scars are non-thermal eigenstates characterized by low entanglement entropy, initially detected in systems subject to nearest-neighbor Rydberg blockade, the so called PXP model. While most of these special eigenstates elude an analytical description and seem to hybridize with nearby thermal eigenstates for large systems, some of them can be written as matrix product states (MPS) with size-independent bond dimension. We study the response of these exact quantum scars to perturbations by analysing the scaling of the fidelity susceptibility with system size. We find that some of them are anomalously stable at first order in perturbation theory, in sharp contrast to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. However, this stability seems to breakdown when all orders are taken into account. We further investigate models with larger blockade radius and find a novel set of exact quantum scars, that we write down analytically and compare with the PXP exact eigenstates. We show that they exhibit the same robustness against perturbations at first order.
The violation of the Floquet version of eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is systematically discussed with realistic Hamiltonians. Our model is based on the PXP type interactions without disorder. We exactly prove the existence of many-body scar states in the Floquet eigenstates, by showing the explicit expressions of the wave functions. Using the underlying physical mechanism, various driven Hamiltonians with Floquet-scar states can be systematically engineered.
The concept of quantum many-body scars has recently been put forward as a route to describe weak ergodicity breaking and violation of the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis. We propose a simple setup to generate quantum many-body scars in a doubly modulated Bose-Hubbard system which can be readily implemented in cold atomic gases. The dynamics are shown to be governed by kinetic constraints which appear via density assisted tunneling in a high-frequency expansion. We find the optimal driving parameters for the kinetically constrained hopping which leads to small isolated subspaces of scared …
Quantum many-body scars have attracted much interest as a violation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) due to recent experimental observation in Rydberg atoms and related theoretical studies. In this paper, we construct a model hosting exact Floquet quantum many-body scars, which violate the Floquet version of ETH. We consider two uniformly-driven static Hamiltonians prohibiting neighboring up spins (Rydberg blockade) like the PXP model, and construct a binary drive composed of them. We show that there exists a four-dimensional subspace which completely avoids thermalization to …
We study the nature of the ergodicity-breaking "quantum many-body scar" states that appear in the PXP model describing constrained Rabi oscillations. For a {wide class of bipartite lattices} of Rydberg atoms, we reveal that the nearly energy-equidistant tower of these states arises from the Hamiltonian's close proximity to a generalized projector-embedding form, a structure common to many models hosting quantum many-body scars. We construct a non-Hermitian, but strictly local extension of the PXP model hosting exact quantum scars, and show how various Hermitian scar-stabilizing extensions from…
We find exponentially many exact quantum many-body scar states in a two-dimensional PXP model -- an effective model for a two-dimensional Rydberg atom array in the nearest-neighbor blockade regime. Such scar states are remarkably simple valence bond solids despite being at effectively infinite temperature, and thus strongly violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Given a particular boundary condition, such eigenstates have integer-valued energies. Moreover, certain charge-density-wave initial states give rise to strong oscillations in the Rydberg excitation density after a quantum qu…
We analyze quantum dynamics of strongly interacting, kinetically constrained many-body systems. Motivated by recent experiments demonstrating surprising long-lived, periodic revivals after quantum quenches in Rydberg atom arrays, we introduce a manifold of locally entangled spin states, representable by low-bond dimension matrix product states, and derive equations of motions for them using the time-dependent variational principle. We find that they feature isolated, unstable periodic orbits, which capture the recurrences and represent nonergodic dynamical trajectories. Our results provide a t…
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.…
The presence of quantum scars, athermal eigenstates of a many-body Hamiltonian with finite energy density, leads to absence of ergodicity and long-time coherent dynamics in closed quantum systems starting from simple initial states. Such non-ergodic coherent dynamics, where the system does not explore its entire phase space, has been experimentally observed in a chain of ultracold Rydberg atoms. We show, via study of a periodically driven Rydberg chain, that the drive frequency acts as a tuning parameter for several reentrant transitions between ergodic and non-ergodic regimes. The former regi…
Quantum many-body scars have been put forward as counterexamples to the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis. These atypical states are observed in a range of correlated models as long-lived oscillations of local observables in quench experiments starting from selected initial states. The long-time memory is a manifestation of quantum non-ergodicity generally linked to a sub-extensive generation of entanglement entropy, the latter of which is widely used as a diagnostic for identifying quantum many-body scars numerically as low entanglement outliers. Here we show that, by adding kinetic constr…
Recent discovery of persistent revivals in quantum simulators based on Rydberg atoms have pointed to the existence of a new type of dynamical behavior that challenged the conventional paradigms of integrability and thermalization. This novel collective effect has been named quantum many-body scars by analogy with weak ergodicity breaking of a single particle inside a stadium billiard. In this overview, we provide a pedagogical introduction to quantum many-body scars and highlight the newly emerged connections with the semiclassical quantization of many-body systems. We discuss the relation bet…
Quantum many-body scarring is believed to be the mechanism behind long-lived coherent oscillations in interacting Rydberg atom chains. These persistent oscillations are due to the large overlap of the many-body scars with certain initial states. We show that the "effective dimension" is a useful measure for identifying non-thermalising initial states in many-body scarred systems. By minimising the effective dimension we find physically reasonable initial states of the Rydberg chain that lead to more pronounced and longer lived oscillations, accentuating the effect of the many-body scars on the…
We consider a model arising in facilitated Rydberg chains with positional disorder which features a Hilbert space with the topology of a $d$-dimensional hypercube. This allows for a straightforward interpretation of the many-body dynamics in terms of a single particle one on the Hilbert space and provides an explicit link between the many-body and single particle scars. Exploiting this perspective, we show that an integrability-breaking disorder enhances the scars followed by inhibition of the dynamics due to strong localization of the eigenstates in the large disorder limit. Next, mapping the…
Quantum many-body scars, long-lived excited states of correlated quantum chaotic systems that evade thermalization, are of great fundamental and technological interest. We create novel scar states in a bosonic 1D quantum gas of dysprosium by stabilizing a super-Tonks-Girardeau gas against collapse and thermalization with repulsive long-range dipolar interactions. Stiffness and energy density measurements show that the system is dynamically stable regardless of contact interaction strength. This enables us to cycle contact interactions from weakly to strongly repulsive, then strongly attractive…
The recent discovery of quantum many-body scar states has revealed the possibility of having states with low entanglement that violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in nonintegrable systems. Such states with low entanglement entropy are rare but naturally exist in the integrable system of free fermions. Here, we demonstrate analytically that these atypical states would be always eliminated when an arbitrary weak interaction is introduced between the fermions. In particular, we show that the probability of having a many-body scar state with entanglement entropy satisfying a sub-volum…
Recent experimental observation of weak ergodicity breaking in Rydberg atom quantum simulators has sparked interest in quantum many-body scars - eigenstates which evade thermalisation at finite energy densities due to novel mechanisms that do not rely on integrability or protection by a global symmetry. A salient feature of some quantum many-body scars is their sub-volume bipartite entanglement entropy. In this work we demonstrate that such exact many-body scars also possess extensive multipartite entanglement structure if they stem from an su(2) spectrum generating algebra. We show this analy…
Quantum many-body scar states are exceptional finite energy density eigenstates in an otherwise thermalizing system that do not satisfy the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We investigate the fate of exact many-body scar states under perturbations. At small system sizes, deformed scar states described by perturbation theory survive. However, we argue for their eventual thermalization in the thermodynamic limit from the finite-size scaling of the off-diagonal matrix elements. Nevertheless, we show numerically and analytically that the nonthermal properties of the scars survive for a parame…
Motivated by recent experimental observations of coherent many-body revivals in a constrained Rydberg atom chain, we construct a weak quasi-local deformation of the Rydberg blockade Hamiltonian, which makes the revivals virtually perfect. Our analysis suggests the existence of an underlying non-integrable Hamiltonian which supports an emergent SU(2)-spin dynamics within a small subspace of the many-body Hilbert space. We show that such perfect dynamics necessitates the existence of atypical, nonergodic energy eigenstates - quantum many-body scars. Furthermore, using these insights, we construc…
Experiments performed on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms have revealed surprising persistent oscillations of local observables. These oscillations have been attributed to a special set of non-ergodic states, referred to as quantum many-body scars. Although a significant amount of research has been invested to understand these special states, it has remained unclear how stable scar states are against disorder. We address this question by studying numerically and analytically the magnetization and spatio-temporal correlators of a model of interacting Rydberg atoms in the presence of disorder.…
Highly excited eigenstates of quantum many-body systems are typically featureless thermal states. Some systems, however, possess a small number of special, low-entanglement eigenstates known as quantum scars. We introduce a quantum-inspired machine learning platform based on a Quantum Variational Autoencoder (QVAE) that detects families of scar states in spectra of many-body systems. Unlike a classical autoencoder, QVAE performs a parametrized unitary operation, allowing us to compress a single eigenstate into a smaller number of qubits. We demonstrate that the autoencoder trained on a scar st…
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…
We generally expect quantum systems to thermalize and satisfy the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), which states that finite energy density eigenstates are thermal. However, some systems, such as many-body localized systems and systems with quantum many-body scars, violate ETH and have high-energy athermal eigenstates. In systems with scars, most eigenstates thermalize, but a few atypical scar states do not. Scar states can give rise to a periodic revival when time-evolving particular initial product states, which can be detected experimentally. Recently, a family of spin Hamiltonian…
Ongoing development of quantum simulators allows for a progressively finer degree of control of quantum many-body systems. This motivates the development of efficient approaches to facilitate the control of such systems and enable the preparation of non-trivial quantum states. Here we formulate an approach to control quantum systems based on matrix product states~(MPS). We compare counter-diabatic and leakage minimization approaches to the so-called local steering problem, that consists in finding the best value of the control parameters for generating a unitary evolution of the specific MPS s…
A recent experiment in the Rydberg atom chain observed unusual oscillatory quench dynamics with a charge density wave initial state, and theoretical works identified a set of many-body "scar states" showing nonthermal behavior in the Hamiltonian as potentially responsible for the atypical dynamics. In the same nonintegrable Hamiltonian, we discover several eigenstates at \emph{infinite temperature} that can be represented exactly as matrix product states with finite bond dimension, for both periodic boundary conditions (two exact $E = 0$ states) and open boundary conditions (two $E = 0$ states…
Symmetry protected quantum many body scars through half-gauging
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University（冲绳科学技术大学院大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）；National Center for Theoretical Sciences（国家理论科学中心）；Academia Sinica（中央研究院）
We elucidate the deep connection between the PXP model, which is a standard model of quantum many-body scars, and the AKLT Hamiltonian. Using the framework of embedded Hamiltonians, we establish the connection between the PXP Hamiltonian and the AKLT Hamiltonian, which clarifies the reason why the PXP Hamiltonian has nonthermal energy eigenstates similar to the AKLT state. Through this analysis, we find that the presence of such nonthermal energy eigenstates reflects the symmetry in the AKLT Hamiltonian.
Non-equilibirum physics of density-difference dependent Hamiltonian: Quantum Scarring from Emergent Chiral Symmetry
Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Collège de France, CNRS, ENS-Université PSL, Sorbonne, Université（卡斯特尔-布罗塞尔实验室，法兰西学院，法国国家科学研究中心，巴黎文理研究大学，索邦大学）；Department of Physics, University of Tokyo（东京大学物理学系）；Institute for Physics of Intelligence, University of Tokyo（东京大学智能物理研究所）；Trans-Scale Quantum Science Institute, University of Tokyo（东京大学跨尺度量子科学研究所）；Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR), Tohoku University（东北大学先进材料研究所（WPI-AIMR））
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 …
The theory of quantum scarring -- a remarkable violation of quantum unique ergodicity -- rests on two complementary pillars: the existence of unstable classical periodic orbits and the so-called quasimodes, i.e., the non-ergodic states that strongly overlap with a small number of the system's eigenstates. Recently, interest in quantum scars has been revived in a many-body setting of Rydberg atom chains. While previous theoretical works have identified periodic orbits for such systems using time-dependent variational principle (TDVP), the link between periodic orbits and quasimodes has been mis…
We study the eigenstate properties of a nonintegrable spin chain that was recently realized experimentally in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator. In the experiment, long-lived coherent many-body oscillations were observed only when the system was initialized in a particular product state. This pronounced coherence has been attributed to the presence of special "scarred" eigenstates with nearly equally-spaced energies and putative nonergodic properties despite their finite energy density. In this paper we uncover a surprising connection between these scarred eigenstates and low-lying quasiparticl…
We construct a family of three-body spin-1/2 Hamiltonians with a super-extensive set of infinitely long-lived multi-magnon states. A magnon in each such state carries either quasi-momentum zero or fixed $p_0\neq$ 0, and energy $Ω$ . These multi-magnon states provide an archetypal example of quantum many-body scars: they are eigenstates at finite energy density that violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, and lead to persistent oscillations in local observables in certain quench experiments. On the technical side, we demonstrate the systematic derivation of scarred Hamiltonians that s…
A quantum many-body scar system usually contains a special non-thermal subspace (approximately) decoupled from the rest of the Hilbert space. In this work, we propose a general structure called deformed symmetric spaces for the decoupled subspaces hosting quantum many-body scars, which are irreducible sectors of simple Lie groups transformed by matrix-product operators (or projected entangled pair operators), of which the entanglement entropies are proved to obey sub-volume-law scaling and thus violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. A deformed symmetric space, in general, is require…
Although entanglement is a key resource for quantum-enhanced metrology, not all entanglement is useful. For example in the process of many-body thermalisation, bipartite entanglement grows rapidly, naturally saturating to a volume law. This type of entanglement generation is ubiquitous in nature but has no known application in most quantum technologies. The generation, stabilisation and exploitation of genuine multipartite entanglement, on the other hand, is far more elusive yet highly desirable for metrological applications. Recently it has been shown that quantum many-body scars can have ext…
