Pulse Engineering of Quantum Many-Body Dynamics: Emergent Scar States, Entanglement, and Nonstabilizerness

Abstract

Understanding and coherently controlling the properties of interacting quantum many-body systems is a central challenge in non-equilibrium quantum physics. While in the past decades, a wide range of many-body Hamiltonians have been introduced to study quantum chaos, atypical eigenstates, and quantum resources, systematically engineering and continuously tuning these properties within a single microscopic model remains largely unexplored. Here, we employ a pulse engineering scheme to construct an effective Hamiltonian that continuously interpolates between a chaotic Heisenberg (XXX) chain with a local impurity and the ZX Hamiltonian. Along this interpolation, we identify several families of analytically tractable atypical eigenstates embedded in the excited-state spectrum with distinct entanglement and nonstabilizerness properties. In the XXX limit, these states exhibit exact plateaus in both entanglement and stabilizer Rényi entropy and correspond to coherent superpositions of long-range valence-bond solid (VBS) states. As the pulse strength increases, the effective Hamiltonians exhibit a hierarchy of new set of approximate entanglement plateaus in the low-energy spectrum. Interestingly, in the fully pulse-engineered ZX limit, we uncover a distinct pair of long-range entangled stabilizer eigenstates, corresponding to rainbow scar states. We further show that pulse engineering preserves the distinct chaotic and non-chaotic regimes of the original model, while that is largely absent in the dynamical generation of entanglement and nonstabilizerness. The pulse-engineered models generate nearly identical quantum resources in both regimes, revealing a partial decoupling between quantum chaos and quantum-resource generation. Our results establish pulse engineering as a versatile framework for generating many-body Hamiltonians with structured eigenstates and tunable quantum resources.