TY - JOUR

T1 - Reviving product states in the disordered Heisenberg chain

AU - Wilming, Henrik

AU - Osborne, Tobias J.

AU - Decker, Kevin S.C.

AU - Karrasch, Christoph

N1 - Funding Information: H.W. would like to thank Merlin Füllgraf and Daniel Burgarth for useful discussions and Berislav Buča for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. We acknowledge support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through SFB 1227 (DQ-mat) (T.J.O.), Quantum Valley Lower Saxony (T.J.O.), and under Germany’s Excellence Strategy EXC-2123 QuantumFrontiers 390837967 (H.W., T.J.O., C.K.). Moreover, we acknowledge support by ‘Niedersächsisches Vorab’ through the ‘Quantum- and Nano-Metrology (QUANOMET)’ initiative within the project P-1 (C.K., K.S.C.D.).

PY - 2023/9/20

Y1 - 2023/9/20

N2 - When a generic quantum system is prepared in a simple initial condition, it typically equilibrates toward a state that can be described by a thermal ensemble. A known exception is localized systems that are non-ergodic and do not thermalize; however, local observables are still believed to become stationary. Here we demonstrate that this general picture is incomplete by constructing product states that feature periodic high-fidelity revivals of the full wavefunction and local observables that oscillate indefinitely. The system neither equilibrates nor thermalizes. This is analogous to the phenomenon of weak ergodicity breaking due to many-body scars and challenges aspects of the current phenomenology of many-body localization, such as the logarithmic growth of the entanglement entropy. To support our claim, we combine analytic arguments with large-scale tensor network numerics for the disordered Heisenberg chain. Our results hold for arbitrarily long times in chains of 160 sites up to machine precision.

AB - When a generic quantum system is prepared in a simple initial condition, it typically equilibrates toward a state that can be described by a thermal ensemble. A known exception is localized systems that are non-ergodic and do not thermalize; however, local observables are still believed to become stationary. Here we demonstrate that this general picture is incomplete by constructing product states that feature periodic high-fidelity revivals of the full wavefunction and local observables that oscillate indefinitely. The system neither equilibrates nor thermalizes. This is analogous to the phenomenon of weak ergodicity breaking due to many-body scars and challenges aspects of the current phenomenology of many-body localization, such as the logarithmic growth of the entanglement entropy. To support our claim, we combine analytic arguments with large-scale tensor network numerics for the disordered Heisenberg chain. Our results hold for arbitrarily long times in chains of 160 sites up to machine precision.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85171809032&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2210.03153

DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2210.03153

M3 - Article

C2 - 37730793

AN - SCOPUS:85171809032

VL - 14

JO - Nature Communications

JF - Nature Communications

SN - 2041-1723

M1 - 5847

ER -