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Exact Quantum Many-Body Scar States in the Rydberg-Blockaded Atom Chain
Cheng-Ju Lin1, Olexei I Motrunich1
1Department of Physics and Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA.
Physical Review Letters
|May 21, 2019
Summary
Researchers discovered exact quantum many-body scar states in a Rydberg atom chain, violating thermalization. These states explain unusual experimental oscillations and exhibit broken translational symmetry at infinite temperature.
Area of Science:
- Quantum physics
- Many-body systems
- Atomic physics
Background:
- Rydberg atom chains exhibit unusual oscillatory quench dynamics.
- Many-body scar states were previously hypothesized to cause nonthermal behavior.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the nature of scar states in a specific nonintegrable Hamiltonian.
- To explain the observed oscillatory quench dynamics in Rydberg atom experiments.
Main Methods:
- Exact diagonalization of the Hamiltonian.
- Representation of eigenstates as matrix product states with finite bond dimension.
- Analysis of symmetry properties and quasiparticle excitations.
Main Results:
- Discovery of several exact eigenstates at infinite temperature representable as matrix product states.
- Demonstration of the violation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis.
- Identification of scar states exhibiting period-2 translational symmetry breaking.
Conclusions:
- The discovered exact scar states provide a theoretical explanation for experimental observations.
- A quasiparticle excitation model is proposed to explain the strong oscillations.
- The findings challenge the universality of thermalization in quantum many-body systems.
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