Abstract
Experiments performed on strongly interacting Rydberg atoms have revealed surprising persistent oscillations of local observables. These oscillations have been attributed to a special set of non-ergodic states, referred to as quantum many-body scars. Although a significant amount of research has been invested to understand these special states, it has remained unclear how stable scar states are against disorder. We address this question by studying numerically and analytically the magnetization and spatio-temporal correlators of a model of interacting Rydberg atoms in the presence of disorder. While the oscillation amplitudes of these observables decay with time as the disorder strength is increased, their oscillation frequency remains remarkably constant. We show that this stability stems from resonances in the disordered spectrum that are approximately centered at the same scar energies of the clean system. We also find that multiple additional sets of scar resonances become accessible due to the presence of disorder and further enhance the oscillation amplitudes. Our results show the robustness of non-ergodic dynamics in scar systems, and opens the door to understanding the behavior of experimentally realistic systems.
Highlights
Recent progress in the design and coherent control of programmable quantum simulators has made it possible to discover new and striking nonequilibrium phenomena [1,2,3,4]
The dynamics of measured observables presented persistent oscillations at finite energy density. This represented a violation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) [5], a central tenet of statistical mechanics
Observables exhibit nonergodic oscillations at the same scar frequency of the clean limit for a time scale t∗ ∼ O W−2. We confirmed this picture of scar resonances by calculating explicitly the disorder-averaged magnetization and temporal correlators of the system, which match closely with the values obtained numerically
Summary
Recent progress in the design and coherent control of programmable quantum simulators has made it possible to discover new and striking nonequilibrium phenomena [1,2,3,4]. This can be understood in terms of a set of L + 1 special eigenstates of the PXP model, referred to as quantum scars, which are embedded in a presumed ergodic spectrum within the nexc = 0 subspace. They are approximately spaced by an energy ωscar = 2π νscar = η , η ≈ 0.636. Understanding the outcome of this competition is the main goal of this work
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