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arXiv:1912.13399 · Physical Review Letters

Onsager’s Scars in Disordered Spin Chains

Naoyuki Shibata, Nobuyuki Yoshioka, Hosho Katsura

Published May 7, 2020• 168 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose a class of nonintegrable quantum spin chains that exhibit quantum many-body scars even in the presence of disorder. With the use of the so-called Onsager symmetry, we construct scarred models for arbitrary spin quantum number S. There are two types of scar states, namely, coherent states associated with an Onsager-algebra element and one-magnon scar states. While both of them are highly excited states, they have area-law entanglement and can be written as a matrix product state. Therefore, they explicitly violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We also investigate the dynamics of the fidelity and entanglement entropy for several initial states. The results clearly show that the scar states are trapped in a perfectly periodic orbit in the Hilbert subspace and never thermalize, whereas other generic states do rapidly. To our knowledge, our model is the first explicit example of disordered quantum many-body scarred models.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.124.180604

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We propose a class of nonintegrable quantum spin chains that exhibit quantum many-body scars even in the presence of disorder. With the use of the so-called Onsager symmetry, we construct scarred models for arbitrary spin quantum number S. There are two types of scar states, namely, coherent states associated with an Onsager-algebra element and one-magnon scar states. While both of them are highly excited states, they have area-law entanglement and can be written as a matrix product state. Therefore, they explicitly violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We also investigate the dynamics of the fidelity and entanglement entropy for several initial states. The results clearly show that the scar states are trapped in a perfectly periodic orbit in the Hilbert subspace and never thermalize, whereas other generic states do rapidly. To our knowledge, our model is the first explicit example of disordered quantum many-body scarred models.
A quantum many-body scar system usually contains a special nonthermal 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 required to have at least a U(1) sub-Lie-group symmetry to allow coherent periodic dynamics from certain low-entangled initial states. We enumerate several possible deforming transformations based on the subgroup symmetry requirement and recover many exact scar eigenstates in the existing scar models, of which the Hamiltonians can be reconstructed using the standard quantum inverse method. In particular, a two-dimensional scar model is proposed, which hosts a periodic dynamical trajectory on which all states are topologically ordered.
Quantum many-body scars are special eigenstates that violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis while residing at finite energy density along with thermalizing eigenstates. The spin-1 XY model is known to host a family of such exceptional states originating from long-lived quasiparticle excitations that exhibit anomalously low entanglement entropy and long-time periodic revivals, resulting in weak ergodicity breaking. We study the stability of these scarred states against typical U(1) symmetry preserving perturbation in the XY chain. While perturbation theory can describe the deformed scar states at small system sizes, finite-size scaling of the perturbation matrix elements indicate that the scars ultimately thermalize in larger chains. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that the long-range order associated with the scars decays under the perturbation, and we estimate the relaxation timescale of oscillatory dynamics in certain local observables to be of order λ−2λ^{-2}λ−2, where λλλ is the perturbation strength.
Isolated quantum many-body systems are often well described by the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. There are, however, mechanisms that cause different behavior: many-body localization and quantum many-body scars. Here, we show how one can find disordered Hamiltonians hosting a tower of scars by adapting a known method for finding parent Hamiltonians. Using this method, we construct a spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ model which is both partially localized and contains scars. We demonstrate that the model is partially localized by studying numerically the level spacing statistics and bipartite entanglement entropy. As disorder is introduced, the adjacent gap ratio transitions from the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble to the Poisson distribution and the entropy shifts from volume-law to area-law scaling. We investigate the properties of scars in a partially localized background and compare with a thermal background. At strong disorder, states initialized inside or outside the scar subspace display different dynamical behavior but have similar entanglement entropy and Schmidt gap. We demonstrate that localization stabilizes scar revivals of initial states with support both inside and outside the scar subspace. Finally, we show how strong disorder introduces additional approximate towers of eigenstates.
Quantum many-body scars are highly excited eigenstates of non-integrable Hamiltonians which violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis and are embedded in a sea of thermal eigenstates. We provide a general mechanism to construct partially integrable models with arbitrarily large local Hilbert space dimensions, which host exact many-body scars. We introduce designed integrability-breaking terms to several exactly solvable spin chains, whose integrable Hamiltonians are composed of the generators of the Temperley-Lieb algebra. In the non-integrable subspace of these models, we identify a special kind of product states -- the generalized spin helix states as exact quantum many-body scars, which lie in the common null space of the non-Hermitian generators of the Temperley-Lieb algebra and are annihilated by the integrability-breaking terms. Our constructions establish an intriguing connection between integrability and quantum many-body scars, meanwhile provide a systematic understanding of scarred Hamiltonians from the perspective of non-Hermitian projectors.
Nonequilibrium 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 nonintegrable disorder-free models in one dimension with constrained dynamics. In this Rapid Communication, 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.
We introduce and study several classes of quantum spin models with multibody interactions that exhibit quantum many-body scars. The models are constructed by two different methods: one exploiting boundary states in integrable spin chains and the other based on a variant of existing methods such as restricted spectrum generating algebras. The first method allows us to construct deformations of the Majumdar-Ghosh and Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki models---prototypes of frustration-free systems. With the second method, we construct a large class of spin-1 models involving scalar spin chirality in both one and two dimensions. Interestingly, in some cases, the models so constructed have towers of scar states of different character. For each example, we show that the scar states behave differently from thermal states by comparing their spectral and dynamical properties with those of other states. We also show that a superposition of the scar states constructed by the second method exhibits perfectly periodic revivals in the dynamics.