Weak Ergodicity Breaking Through the Lens of Quantum Entanglement

Recent studies of interacting systems of quantum spins, ultracold atoms, and correlated fermions have shed a new light on how isolated many-body systems can avoid rapid equilibration to their thermal state. It has been shown that many such systems can “weakly” break ergodicity: they possess a small number of non-thermalising eigenstates and/or display slow relaxation from certain initial conditions, while the majority of other initial states equilibrate fast, like in conventional thermalising systems. In this chapter, we provide a pedagogical introduction to weak ergodicity breaking phenomena, including Hilbert space fragmentation and quantum many-body scars. Central to these developments have been the tools based on quantum entanglement, in particular matrix product states and tangent space techniques, which have allowed to analytically construct non-thermal eigenstates in various non-integrable quantum models, and to explore semiclassical quantisation of such systems in the absence of a large-N or mean-field limit. We also discuss recent experimental realisations of weak ergodicity breaking phenomena in systems of Rydberg atoms and tilted optical lattices.