PIRSA:18110072

Exact Strong-ETH Violating Eigenstates in the Rydberg-blockaded Atom Chain

Lin, C. (2018). Exact Strong-ETH Violating Eigenstates in the Rydberg-blockaded Atom Chain. Perimeter Institute. https://pirsa.org/18110072

Lin, Cheng-Ju. Exact Strong-ETH Violating Eigenstates in the Rydberg-blockaded Atom Chain. Perimeter Institute, Nov. 19, 2018, https://pirsa.org/18110072 

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:18110072,
            doi = {10.48660/18110072},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/18110072},
            author = {Lin, Cheng-Ju},
            keywords = {Condensed Matter},
            language = {en},
            title = {Exact Strong-ETH Violating Eigenstates in the Rydberg-blockaded Atom Chain},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2018},
            month = {nov},
            note = {PIRSA:18110072 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }

Cheng-Ju Lin

University of Maryland, College Park

Talk number
PIRSA:18110072
Collection
Talk Type
Subject
Abstract

A recent experiment in the Rydberg atom chain observed unusual oscillatory quench dynamics with a charge density wave initial state, and theoretical works identified a set of many-body ``scar states'' in the Hamiltonian as potentially responsible for the atypical dynamics. In the same nonintegrable Hamiltonian, we discover several eigenstates at infinite temperature that can be represented exactly as matrix product states with finite bond dimension, for both periodic boundary conditions (two exact E = 0 states) and open boundary conditions (two E = 0 states and one each E =± √2). This discovery explicitly demonstrates violation of strong eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in this model. These states show signatures of translational symmetry breaking with period-2 bond-centered pattern, despite being in 1D at infinite temperature. We show that the nearby many-body scar states with energies E ~± 1.33 andE ~ ± 2.66 can be well approximated as ``quasiparticle excitations" on top of our exact E = 0 states, and propose a quasiparticle explanation of the strong oscillations observed in experiments.