Turner, CJ orcid.org/0000-0003-2500-3438, Michailidis, AA, Abanin, DA et al. (2 more authors) (2018) Weak ergodicity breaking from quantum many-body scars. Nature Physics, 14 (7). pp. 745-749. ISSN 1745-2473
Abstract
The thermodynamic description of many-particle systems rests on the assumption of ergodicity, the ability of a system to explore all allowed configurations in the phase space. Recent studies on many-body localization have revealed the existence of systems that strongly violate ergodicity in the presence of quenched disorder. Here, we demonstrate that ergodicity can be weakly broken by a different mechanism, arising from the presence of special eigenstates in the many-body spectrum that are reminiscent of quantum scars in chaotic non-interacting systems. In the single-particle case, quantum scars correspond to wavefunctions that concentrate in the vicinity of unstable periodic classical trajectories. We show that many-body scars appear in the Fibonacci chain, a model with a constrained local Hilbert space that has recently been experimentally realized in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator. The quantum scarred eigenstates are embedded throughout the otherwise thermalizing many-body spectrum but lead to direct experimental signatures, as we show for periodic recurrences that reproduce those observed in the experiment. Our results suggest that scarred many-body bands give rise to a new universality class of quantum dynamics, opening up opportunities for the creation of novel states with long-lived coherence in systems that are now experimentally realizable.
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 Macmillan Publishers Limited. This is an author produced version of a paper accepted for publication in Nature Physics. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. | ||||||
Keywords: | Statistical physics; Theoretical physics | ||||||
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Institution: | The University of Leeds | ||||||
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) | ||||||
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Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications | ||||||
Date Deposited: | 15 May 2018 13:28 | ||||||
Last Modified: | 14 Nov 2018 01:39 | ||||||
Status: | Published | ||||||
Publisher: | Springer Nature | ||||||
Identification Number: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0137-5 | ||||||
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