Efficient search for excitable zero-modes in constrained systems

Abstract

Kinetically constrained systems, such as those representing Rydberg atom arrays in the blockade regime, have gathered considerable attention due to the presence of atypical eigenstates in their spectrum. The latter manifests itself through the presence of quantum many-body scars as well as unusually large zero-mode (ZM) subspaces which contain analytically tractable eigenstates with various entanglement scalings. In particular, some of the latter are excitable zero-modes (EZMs), meaning that they can be promoted to a non-zero energy for open boundary conditions. In this work, I present an efficient protocol for finding analytical expressions for translation-invariant EZMs in constrained systems, based on the eigendecomposition of the local unconstrained Hamiltonian. I demonstrate the power of this method on a decorated Rydberg chain. In that model, my protocol directly produces a continuous matrix-product-state manifold located entirely in the zero-energy eigenspace for periodic boundary conditions. The span of that manifold grows exponentially with the system, and for odd system sizes it covers the entire zero-momentum eigenspace with zero energy. I then show how the physical structure of the manifold, which is tied to the local eigenbasis, also allows one to derive analytical expressions for ZMs at non-zero momentum and for a polynomial number of exact scars at $E=\pm\sqrt{3}$.