We present a general framework to implement massive Nambu-Goldstone quasi-particles in driven many-body systems. The underlying mechanism leverages an explicit Lie group structure imprinted into an effective Hamiltonian that governs the dynamics of slow degrees of freedom; the resulting emergent continuous symmetry is weakly explicitly broken, giving rise to a massive Nambu-Goldstone mode, with a spectral mass gap scaling linearly with the drive period. We discuss explicit and experimentally implementable realizations, such as Heisenberg-like spin models that support gapped spin-wave excitations. We provide a protocol to certify the existence of the massive Nambu-Goldstone mode from the dynamics of specific observables, and analyse the dispersion spectrum and their lifetime in the presence of weak explicit symmetry breaking.
We present a general framework to implement massive Nambu-Goldstone quasi-particles in driven many-body systems. The underlying mechanism leverages an explicit Lie group structure imprinted into an effective Hamiltonian that governs the dynamics of slow degrees of freedom; the resulting emergent continuous symmetry is weakly explicitly broken, giving rise to a massive Nambu-Goldstone mode, with a spectral mass gap scaling linearly with the drive period. We discuss explicit and experimentally implementable realizations, such as Heisenberg-like spin models that support gapped spin-wave excitations. We provide a protocol to certify the existence of the massive Nambu-Goldstone mode from the dynamics of specific observables, and analyse the dispersion spectrum and their lifetime in the presence of weak explicit symmetry breaking.
Periodically driven quantum systems host exotic phenomena that often do not have any analog in undriven systems. Floquet prethermalization and dynamical freezing of certain observables, via the emergence of conservation laws, are realized by controlling the drive frequency. Recent experimental developments in synthetic quantum matter, such as superconducting qubits and cold atoms, have opened avenues for implementing local Floquet engineering which can achieve spatially modulated quantum control of states. Here, we uncover the novel memory effects of local periodic driving in a nonintegrable spin-half staggered Heisenberg chain. For a boundary-driven protocol at the dynamical freezing frequency, we show the formation of an approximate strong zero mode, a prethermal quasilocal operator, due to the emergence of a discrete global Z2 symmetry. This is captured by constructing an accurate effective Floquet Hamiltonian using a higher-order partially resummed Floquet-Magnus expansion. The lifetime of the boundary spin can be exponentially enhanced by enlarging the set of suitably chosen driven sites. We demonstrate that in the asymptotic limit, achieved by increasing the number of driven sites, a strong zero mode emerges, where the lifetime of the boundary spin grows exponentially with system size. The nonlocal processes in the Floquet Hamiltonian play a pivotal role in the total freezing of the boundary spin in the thermodynamic limit. The novel dynamics of the boundary spin is accompanied by a rich structure of entanglement in the Floquet eigenstates where specific bipartitions yield an area-law scaling while the entanglement for random bipartitions scales as a volume-law. Our work addresses the long-standing question of the existence of a strong zero mode in a nonintegrable model and elucidates the complex nature of thermalization in locally driven systems. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We study simultaneous symmetry breaking in spontaneous Floquet states, focusing on the specific case of an atomic condensate. We first describe the quantization of the Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes for a stationary state simultaneously breaking several symmetries of the Hamiltonian by invoking the generalized Gibbs ensemble, which enables a thermodynamical description of the problem. The quantization procedure involves a Berry-Gibbs connection, which depends on the macroscopic conserved charges associated to each broken symmetry and whose curvature is not invariant under generalized gauge transformations. We extend the formalism to Floquet states, where Goldstone theorem translates into the emergence of Floquet-Nambu-Goldstone (FNG) modes with zero quasi-energy. In the case of a spontaneous Floquet state, there is a genuine temporal FNG mode arising from the continuous time-translation symmetry breaking, whose quantum amplitude provides a rare realization of a time operator in Quantum Mechanics. Furthermore, since they conserve energy, spontaneous Floquet states can be shown to possess a conserved Floquet charge. Conventional Floquet systems also admit a thermodynamic description in terms of the Floquet enthalpy, the Legendre transform of the energy with respect to the Floquet charge, as these operate at fixed frequency. We apply our formalism to a particular realization of spontaneous Floquet state, the CES state, which breaks U(1) and time-translation symmetries, representing a time supersolid. We numerically compute its density-density correlations, predicted to be dominated by the temporal FNG mode at long times, observing a remarkable agreement between simulation and theory. Based on these results, we propose a feasible experimental scheme to observe the temporal FNG mode of the CES state.
Recent work has shown that a variety of driven phases of matter arise in Floquet systems. Among these are many-body localized phases which spontaneously break unitary symmetries and exhibit novel multiplets of Floquet eigenstates separated by quantized quasienergies. Here we show that these properties are to {\it all} weak local deformations of the underlying Floquet drives, and that the models considered until now occupy sub-manifolds within these larger stable phases. While these absolutely phases have no explicit Hamiltonian independent global symmetries, they spontaneously break Hamiltonian dependent {\it emergent} unitary or anti-unitary symmetries, and thus continue to exhibit the novel multiplet structure. We show that the out of equilibrium dynamics exhibit a lack of synchrony with the drive characterized by infinitely many distinct frequencies, most incommensurate with the fundamental period --- i.e., these phases look like time glasses. Floquet eigenstates, however, exhibit a purely commensurate temporal crystalline periodicity for a special class of bilocal operators with infinite separation which reflects the dynamics of the order parameter for the emergent symmetries.
The low-energy dynamics of many-body systems is governed by gapless modes whose properties are dictated by symmetry. Their existence follows from Goldstone's theorem, while their effective description at zero temperature is determined by the pattern of symmetry breaking. At finite temperature, an analogous role is played by hydrodynamics, which describes the universal behavior of many-body systems over long times and large distances. These principles are well understood for uniform symmetries, which act homogeneously in spacetime and lead to a correspondence between massless Goldstone modes and broken generators, as well as gapless hydrodynamic modes and conserved charges. However, this simple picture changes in the presence of nonuniform symmetries, whose generators do not commute with spacetime translations. The low-energy implications of these symmetries remain less understood, as they do not introduce additional gapless modes but instead constrain the dynamics of the existing degrees of freedom. In this thesis, we develop a unified framework for many-body systems with nonuniform symmetries and show that their effects can be understood in terms of additional fields that are not independent at low energies and can be eliminated, leading to kinematic constraints that reshape the infrared dynamics. In systems with spontaneous symmetry breaking, this mechanism modifies the effective theory and often softens the dispersion relations of the remaining modes. At finite temperature, it manifests in hydrodynamics as constraints on macroscopic currents. As a result, nonuniform symmetries give rise to qualitatively new physical phenomena, including modified spectra of collective excitations, exemplified by transverse Tkachenko oscillations in quantum vortex crystals, and unconventional transport phenomena, such as anomalously slow diffusion and softened sound modes in dipole-conserving systems.
From the quasisymmetry-group perspective [J. Ren , ], we show the universal existence of collective, coherent modes of excitations in many-body scar models in the degenerate limit, where the energy spacing in the scar tower vanishes. The number of these modes, as well as the quantum numbers carried by them, are given, not by the symmetry of the Hamiltonian, but by the quasisymmetry of the scar tower: hence the name quasi-Nambu-Goldstone modes. Based on this, we draw a concrete analogy between the paradigm of spontaneous symmetry breaking and the many-body scar physics in the degenerate limit. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
For a quantum many-body spin system undergoing spontaneous symmetry breaking with type-B Goldstone modes, a high degree of degeneracy arises in the ground state manifold. Generically, if this degeneracy is polynomial in system size, then it does not depend on the type of boundary conditions used. However, if there exists an emergent (local) symmetry operation tailored to a specific degenerate ground state, then we show that the degeneracies are exponential in system size and are different under periodic boundary conditions (PBCs) and open boundary conditions (OBCs). We further show that the exponential ground state degeneracies in turn imply the emergence of Goldstone flat bands -- single-mode excitations generated by a multi-site operator and its images under the repeated action of the translation operation under PBCs or the cyclic permutation symmetry operation under OBCs. Conversely, we also show that the presence of emergent Goldstone flat bands implies that there exists an emergent (local) symmetry operation tailored to a specific degenerate ground state. In addition, we propose an extrinsic characterization of emergent Goldstone flat bands, revealing a connection to quantum many-body scars, which violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We illustrate this by presenting examples from the staggered SU(4) spin-1 ferromagnetic biquadratic model and the staggered SU(4) ferromagnetic spin-orbital model. We also perform extensive numerical simulations for the more general SO(3) spin-1 bilinear-biquadratic and SO(4) ferromagnetic spin-orbital models, containing the two aforementioned models as the endpoints in the ferromagnetic regimes respectively, and confirm the emergence of Goldstone flat bands, as we approach these endpoints from deep inside the ferromagnetic regimes.