Disorder-free localisation in permutation symmetric fermionic quantum walks

Abstract

We investigate the phenomenon of disorder-free localisation in a quantum system with a global permutation symmetry and the exchange symmetry for identical particles. We start with a systematic construction of many-fermion Hamiltonians with a global permutation symmetry using the conjugacy classes of the permutation group $S_N$, with $N$ being the total number of fermions. The resulting Hamiltonians are interpreted as generators of continuous-time quantum walk of indistinguishable fermions. In this setup we analytically solve the simplest example and show that for large $N$ all the states are localised without the introduction of any disorder coefficients. The localisation is also time-independent and is not the result of any emergent disorder. This seems to be an important distinction from other mechanisms of disorder-free localisation. Furthermore, we show that the localisation is stable to interactions that preserve the global $S_N$ symmetry making these systems potential candidates for a quantum memory. By marking sites and reducing the symmetry to subgroups of $S_N$, the localisation can be obtained for any $N$ by tuning the symmetry-reducing parameters in the Hamiltonian. Finally we show that similar localisation also occurs for spin systems governed by a $S_N$-symmetric Heisenberg chain and we make a few comments about $S_N$-symmetric bosonic systems. The models we propose feature all-to-all connectivity and can be realised on superconducting quantum circuits and trapped ion systems.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures ; v2- 27 pages, 2 figures, slight modifications in the abstract and introductio