Quantum many-body scars (QMBS) constitute a new quantum dynamical regime in which rare "scarred" eigenstates mediate weak ergodicity breaking. One open question is to understand the most general setting in which these states arise. In this work, we develop a generic construction that embeds a new class of QMBS, rainbow scars, into the spectrum of an arbitrary Hamiltonian. Unlike other examples of QMBS, rainbow scars display extensive bipartite entanglement entropy while retaining a simple entanglement structure. Specifically, the entanglement scaling is volume-law for a random bipartition, while scaling for a fine-tuned bipartition is sub-extensive. When internal symmetries are present, the construction leads to multiple, and even towers of rainbow scars revealed through distinctive non-thermal dynamics. Remarkably, certain symmetries can lead rainbow scars to arise in translation-invariant models. To this end, we provide an experimental road map for realizing rainbow scar states in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator, leading to coherent oscillations distinct from the strictly sub-volume-law QMBS previously realized in the same system.
An exponential deformation of a 1D critical Hamiltonian, with couplings falling on a length scale $h^{-1}$, gives rise to ground states whose entanglement entropy follows a volume law, i.e. the area law is violated maximally. The ground state is now in the so-called {\em rainbow phase}, where valence bonds connect sites on the left half with their symmetric counterparts on the right. Here we discuss some of the most relevant features of this rainbow phase, focusing on the XX and Heisenberg models. Moreover, we show that the rainbow state can be understood either as a thermo-field double of a c…
The {\em rainbow state} denotes a set of valence bond states organized concentrically around the center of a spin 1/2 chain. It is the ground state of an inhomogeneous XX Hamiltonian and presents maximal violation of the area law of entanglement entropy. Here, we add a tunable exchange coupling constant at the center, $γ$, and show that it induces entanglement transitions of the ground state. At very strong inhomogeneity, the rainbow state survives for $0 \leq γ\leq 1$, while outside that region the ground state is a product of dimers. In the weak inhomogeneity regime the entanglement entropy …
The discovery of novel entanglement patterns in quantum many-body systems is a prominent research direction in contemporary physics. Here we provide the example of a spin chain with random and inhomogeneous couplings that in the ground state exhibits a very unusual area law violation. In the clean limit, i.e., without disorder, the model is the rainbow chain and has volume law entanglement. We show that, in the presence of disorder, the entanglement entropy exhibits a power-law growth with the subsystem size, with an exponent 1/2. By employing the Strong Disorder Renormalization Group (SDRG) f…
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…
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…
We construct a set of exact, highly excited eigenstates for a nonintegrable spin-1/2 model in one dimension that is relevant to experiments on Rydberg atoms in the antiblockade regime. These states provide a new solvable example of quantum many-body scars: their sub-volume-law entanglement and equal energy spacing allow for infinitely long-lived coherent oscillations of local observables following a suitable quantum quench. While previous works on scars have interpreted such oscillations in terms of the precession of an emergent macroscopic SU(2) spin, the present model evades this description…
Formation of quantum scars in many-body systems provides a novel mechanism for enhancing coherence of weakly entangled states. At the same time, coherence of edge modes in certain symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases can persist away from the ground state. In this work we show the existence of many-body scars and their implications on bulk coherence in such an SPT phase. To this end, we study the eigenstate properties and the dynamics of an interacting spin-$1/2$ chain with three-site "cluster" terms hosting a $\mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2$ SPT phase. Focusing on the weakly interact…
In this letter, we study the PXP Hamiltonian with an external magnetic field that exhibits both quantum scar states and quantum criticality. It is known that this model hosts a series of quantum many-body scar states violating quantum thermalization at zero magnetic field, and it also exhibits an Ising quantum phase transition driven by finite magnetic field. Although the former involves the properties of generic excited states and the latter concerns the low-energy physics, we discover two surprising connections between them, inspired by the observation that both states possess log-volume law…
While the chiral linear Luttinger liquid is integrable via bosonization, its non-linear counterpart does not admit for an analytic solution. In this work, we find a sub-extensive number of exact eigenstates for a large family of density-density interaction terms. These states are embedded in a continuum of strongly-correlated excited states. The real-space entanglement entropy of some exact states scales logarithmically with system size, while that of others has volume-law scaling. We introduce momentum-space entanglement as an unambiguous differentiator between these exact states and the rema…
Inverting multiple quantum many-body scars via disorder
Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学理论科学研究所）；CAS Center for Excellence in Topological Quantum Computation, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学拓扑量子计算卓越创新中心）
The entanglement entropy of the ground state of a quantum lattice model with local interactions usually satisfies an area law. However, in 1D systems some violations may appear in inhomogeneous systems or in random systems. In our inhomogeneous system, the inhomogeneity parameter, $h$, allows us to tune different regimes where a volumetric violation of the area law appears. We apply the strong disorder renormalization group to describe the maximally entangled state of the system in a strong inhomogeneity regime. Moreover, in a weak inhomogeneity regime, we use a continuum approximation to desc…
We obtain multiple exact results on the entanglement of the exact excited states of non-integrable models we introduced in arXiv:1708.05021. We first discuss a general formalism to analytically compute the entanglement spectra of exact excited states using Matrix Product States and Matrix Product Operators and illustrate the method by reproducing a general result on single-mode excitations. We then apply this technique to analytically obtain the entanglement spectra of the infinite tower of states of the spin-$S$ AKLT models in the zero and finite energy density limits. We show that in the zer…
Metal-to-insulator transitions (MITs) are a dramatic manifestation of strong electron correlations in solids1. The insulating phase can often be suppressed by quantum tuning, i.e. varying a nonthermal parameter such as chemical composi- tion or pressure, resulting in a zero-temperature quantum phase transition (QPT) to a metallic state driven by quantum fluctuations, in contrast to conventional phase transitions driven by thermal fluctuations. Theories of exotic phenomena known to occur near the Mott QPT such as quantum criticality and high-temperature superconductivity often assume a second-o…
