Quantum Science Seminar with Julia Wildeboer on Rainbow Scars: From Area to Volume Law

Quantum Science Seminar with Julia Wildeboer on Rainbow Scars: From Area to Volume Law

Julia Wildeboer (Hosted by Seidel) from Iowa State University will be presenting the seminar "Rainbow Scars: From Area to Volume Law"

Quantum many-body scars (QMBS) constitute a new quantum dynamical regime in which rare "scarred'' eigenstates mediate weak ergodicity breaking. One open question is to understand the most general setting in which these states arise. In this talk, I will introduce a generic construction that embeds a new class of QMBS, rainbow scars, into the spectrum of a Hamiltonian.

Unlike other examples of QMBS, rainbow scars display extensive bipartite entanglement entropy while retaining a simple entanglement structure. Specifically, the entanglement scaling is volume-law for a random bipartition, while scaling for a fine-tuned bipartition is sub-extensive. When internal symmetries are present, the construction leads to multiple rainbow scars revealed through distinctive non-thermal dynamics. Remarkably, certain symmetries can lead to rainbow scars arising in translation-invariant models. If time permits, I will provide an experimental road map for realizing rainbow scar states in a Rydberg-atom quantum simulator, leading to coherent oscillations distinct from the strictly sub-volume-law QMBS previously realized in the same system.