Asymmetric decay of quantum many-body scars in XYZ quantum spin chains

Abstract

Quantum many-body scars are atypical energy eigenstates of chaotic quantum many-body systems that prevent certain special non-equilibrium initial conditions from thermalizing. We point out that quantum many-body scars exist for any nearest-neighbor spin-$S$ XYZ quantum spin chain, and arise in the form of an infinite family of highly excited yet nonentangled product-state eigenstates, which define periodic textures in spin space. This set of scars, discovered originally by Granovskii and Zhedanov in 1985, encompasses both the experimentally relevant 'spin helices' for XXZ chains and more complicated helix-like states constructed from Jacobi elliptic functions for generic XYZ chains. An appealing feature of Granovskii-Zhedanov scars is that they are well-defined in the semiclassical limit $S \to \infty$, which allows for a systematic and analytical treatment of their dynamical instability to perturbations of the Hamiltonian. Using time-dependent spin-wave theory, we predict that upon perturbing along certain directions in Hamiltonian space, Granovskii-Zhedanov scars exhibit a dramatic asymmetry in their decay: depending on the sign of the perturbation, the decrease of their contrast is either slow and linear, or fast and exponential in time. This asymmetry can be traced to the absence (presence) of imaginarity in the spectrum of the Bogoliubov Hamiltonian governing quantum fluctuations about the scar, which corresponds to the absence (presence) of a non-zero Lyapunov exponent for the limiting classical trajectory. Numerical simulations using matrix product states (MPS) and infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD) confirm that our prediction remains valid even far from the semiclassical limit. Our findings challenge existing theories of how quantum-many body scars relax.