2018/12/13 by Soonwon Choi, Christopher J. Turner, Hannes Pichler +6 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.122.220603
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 220603 (2019) · 6+11 pages, 3+6 figures
arxiv created 2018/12/13 · arxiv updated 2019/06/13
Motivated by recent experimental observations of coherent many-body revivals in a constrained Rydberg atom chain, we construct a weak quasi-local deformation of the Rydberg blockade Hamiltonian, which makes the revivals virtually perfect. Our analysis suggests the existence of an underlying non-integrable Hamiltonian which supports an emergent SU(2)-spin dynamics within a small subspace of the many-body Hilbert space. We show that such perfect dynamics necessitates the existence of atypical, nonergodic energy eigenstates - quantum many-body scars. Furthermore, using these insights, we construct a toy model that hosts exact quantum many-body scars, providing an intuitive explanation of their origin. Our results offer specific routes to enhancing coherent many-body revivals, and provide a step towards establishing the stability of quantum many-body scars in the thermodynamic limit.