Exploring the Regime of Fragmentation in Strongly Tilted Fermi-Hubbard Chains

Intriguingly, quantum many-body systems may defy thermalization even without disorder. One example is so-called fragmented models, where the many-body Hilbert space fragments into dynamically disconnected subspaces that are not determined by the global symmetries of the model. In this Letter we demonstrate that the tilted one-dimensional Fermi-Hubbard model naturally realizes distinct effective Hamiltonians that are expected to support nonergodic behavior due to fragmentation, even at resonances between the tilt energy and the Hubbard on site interaction. We find that the effective description captures the observed dynamics in experimentally accessible parameter ranges of moderate tilt values. Specifically, we observe a pronounced dependence of the relaxation dynamics on the initial doublon fraction, which directly reveals the microscopic processes of the fragmented model. Our results pave the way for future studies of nonergodic behavior in higher dimensions.