Exact three-colored quantum scars from geometric frustration

Abstract

Nonequilibrium properties of quantum materials present many intriguing properties, among them athermal behavior, which violates the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. Such behavior has primarily been observed in disordered systems. More recently, experimental and theoretical evidence for athermal eigenstates, known as “quantum scars,” has emerged in nonintegrable disorder-free models in one dimension with constrained dynamics. In this Rapid Communication, we show the existence of quantum scar eigenstates and investigate their dynamical properties in many simple two-body Hamiltonians with “staggered” interactions, involving ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic motifs, in arbitrary dimensions. These magnetic models include simple modifications of widely studied ones (e.g., the XXZ model) on a variety of frustrated and unfrustrated lattices. We demonstrate our ideas by focusing on the two-dimensional frustrated spin-1/2 kagome antiferromagnet, which was previously shown to harbor a special exactly solvable point with “three-coloring” ground states in its phase diagram. For appropriately chosen initial product states—for example, those which correspond to any state of valid three-colors—we show the presence of robust quantum revivals, which survive the addition of anisotropic terms. We also suggest avenues for future experiments which may see this effect in real materials