SP Seminar @ICTP Stasi Room Tuesday 16 January at 11 am Zlatko PAPIC

[CM Section]

Joint ICTP/SISSA Statistical Physics Seminar

Tuesday 16 January at 11:00 a.m.
ICTP, Luigi Stasi Seminar Room, first floor, Leonardo building
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Speaker:
Zlatko PAPIC

Title:
Quantum Many-body Scars and Non-Ergodic Dynamics in the Fibonacci Chain

Abstract:
Recent experiments on large chains of Rydberg atoms [H. Bernien et al., 
arXiv:1707.04344]
have demonstrated the possibility of realizing 1D systems with locally 
constrained Hilbert
spaces, along with some surprising signatures of non-ergodic dynamics, 
such as persistent
oscillations following a quench from the Neel product state. I will 
argue that this phenomenon
is a manifestation of a "quantum many-body scar", i.e., a concentration 
of extensively many
eigenstates of the system around special many-body states. The special 
states are analogs
of unstable classical periodic orbits in the single-particle quantum 
scars. I will present a model
based on a single particle hopping on the Hilbert space graph, which 
quantitatively captures
the scarred wave functions up to large systems of 32 atoms. These 
results suggest that
scarred many-body bands give rise to a new universality class of quantum 
dynamics, which
opens up opportunities for creating and manipulating novel states with 
long-lived coherence
in systems that are now amenable to experimental study.