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arXiv:2004.04431 · Physical Review Research

Exact Floquet quantum many-body scars under Rydberg blockade

Kaoru Mizuta, Kazuaki Takasan, Norio Kawakami

Published Aug 21, 2020• 79 citations
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Abstract

The authors propose quantum many-body scars in periodically-driven systems in the presence of Rydberg blockade. While almost all states relax to infinite temperature states, the states in a subspace spanned by exact Floquet scar eigenstates completely avoid thermalization and show persistent oscillation in both microscopic and stroboscopic time

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.2.033284

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The authors propose quantum many-body scars in periodically-driven systems in the presence of Rydberg blockade. While almost all states relax to infinite temperature states, the states in a subspace spanned by exact Floquet scar eigenstates completely avoid thermalization and show persistent oscillation in both microscopic and stroboscopic time
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 an infinite temperature that can be represented exactly as matrix product states with a finite bond dimension, for both periodic boundary conditions (two exact E=0 states) and open boundary conditions (two E=0 states and one each E=±sqrt[2]). This discovery explicitly demonstrates the violation of the strong eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in this model and uncovers exact quantum many-body scar states. These states show signatures of translational symmetry breaking with a period-2 bond-centered pattern, despite being in one dimension at an infinite temperature. We show that the nearby many-body scar states can be well approximated as "quasiparticle excitations" on top of our exact E=0 scar states and propose a quasiparticle explanation of the strong oscillations observed in experiments.
The violation of the Floquet version of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is rigorously discussed with realistic Hamiltonians.Our model is based on the PXP-type interactions without disorder.We rigorously prove the existence of many-body scar states in the Floquet eigenstates that appear only at specific periods of driving by showing the explicit expressions of the wave functions.This is equivalently the first rigorous proof of the breakdown of the Floquet eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.Through the exact expression of the scar states, the underlying physical mechanism is clarified.Using the underlying mechanism, various driven Hamiltonians with Floquet-scar states can be systematically engineered.We then discuss Floquet-scar states that can be checked through time evolution of observables in a chain of Rydberg atoms.
The presence of quantum scars, athermal eigenstates of a many-body Hamiltonian with finite-energy density, leads to an absence of ergodicity and long-time coherent dynamics starting from initial states that have a high overlap with scars as 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 weak ergodicity breaking regimes. The former regime shows rapid thermalization of correlation functions and absence of scars in the Floquet spectrum of the system. The latter regime, in contrast, has scars; they lead to long-time coherent dynamics of correlation functions. We provide an analytical explanation of the existence of these regimes by going beyond a high-frequency Magnus expansion and using a novel perturbative approach valid at large drive amplitudes to derive a Floquet Hamiltonian which qualitatively explains the behavior of the driven system at arbitrary frequencies. We also discuss experiments involving finite Rydberg chains which can validate our theory. Our results demonstrate the possibility of drive-frequency-induced tuning between ergodic and weak ergodicity breaking dynamics in a disorder-free quantum many-body system.
Persistent revivals recently observed in Rydberg atom simulators have challenged our understanding of thermalization and attracted much interest to the concept of quantum many-body scars (QMBSs). QMBSs are non-thermal highly excited eigenstates that coexist with typical eigenstates in the spectrum of many-body Hamiltonians, and have since been reported in multiple theoretical models, including the so-called PXP model, approximately realized by Rydberg simulators. At the same time, questions of how common QMBSs are and in what models they are physically realized remain open. In this Letter, we demonstrate that QMBSs exist in a broader family of models that includes and generalizes PXP to longer-range constraints and states with different periodicity. We show that in each model, multiple QMBS families can be found. Each of them relies on a different approximate su(2) algebra, leading to oscillatory dynamics in all cases. However, in contrast to the PXP model, their observation requires launching dynamics from weakly entangled initial states rather than from a product state. QMBSs reported here may be experimentally probed using Rydberg atom simulator in the regime of longer-range Rydberg blockades.
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 an effectively infinite temperature, and thus strongly violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. For 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 quench and towerlike structures in their overlaps with eigenstates.