Quantum many-body scars and weak breaking of ergodicity
By Maksym Serbyn, D. Abanin, Z. Papi'c. Nature Physics, 2020
602 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Thermalization is the inevitable fate of many complex quantum systems, whose dynamics allow them to fully explore the vast configuration space regardless of the initial state—the behaviour known as quantum ergodicity. In a quest for experimental realizations of coherent long-time dynamics, efforts have focused on ergodicity-breaking mechanisms, such as integrability and localization. The recent discovery of persistent revivals in quantum simulators based on Rydberg atoms have pointed to the existence of a new type of behaviour where the system rapidly relaxes for most initial conditions, while certain initial states give rise to non-ergodic dynamics. This collective effect has been named ‘quantum many-body scarring’ by analogy with a related form of weak ergodicity breaking that occurs for a single particle inside a stadium billiard potential. In this Review, we provide a pedagogical introduction to quantum many-body scars and highlight the emerging connections with the semiclassical quantization of many-body systems. We discuss the relation between scars and more general routes towards weak violations of ergodicity due to embedded algebras and non-thermal eigenstates, and highlight possible applications of scars in quantum technology. Most large quantum systems are ergodic, meaning that over time they forget their initial conditions and thermalize. This article reviews our understanding of seemingly ergodic systems that in fact have some long-lived, non-thermal states.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/874837ffe8aac11d1114b8e66fbe73f1e4661de0
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- V. Khemani
- A. Nahum
- Matthew Fisher
- S. Vijay
- Roderich Moessner
- Anushya Chandran
- Thomas Iadecola
- Z. Papi'c
Citations in the corpus
- Quantum simulation of fundamental particles and forces (2023, background): “…[114], and a better understanding of phenomena such as the slow or potential lack of thermalization of quantum many-body “scar” states [250, 251], and dynamical quantum phase transitions in non-equilibrium settings [252–255], and their prevalence in gauge theories [256– 263], have begun to…”
- Random Quantum Circuits (2022, background): “Physical Review X, 11(4):041004, 2021.”
- Observation of many-body scarring in a Bose-Hubbard quantum simulator (2022, background): “where preparing the system in special initial states effectively traps it in a “cold” subspace that does not mix with the thermalizing bulk of the spectrum [7,8].”
- Quantum Many-Body Scars: A Quasiparticle Perspective (2022, background): “(57), emphasizes the connections to classical periodic orbits using semi-classics, while the second, Ref.”