Systematic construction of scarred many-body dynamics in 1D lattice models

Abstract

We introduce a family of non-integrable 1D lattice models that feature robust periodic revivals under a global quench from certain initial product states, thus generalizing the phenomenon of many-body scarring recently observed in Rydberg atom quantum simulators. Our construction is based on a systematic embedding of the single-site unitary dynamics into a kinetically-constrained many-body system. We numerically demonstrate that this construction yields optimal models with the highest amplitude of the wave-function revivals, and it captures all local 1D lattice models that support scars for the fixed choice of the kinetic constraint. We show that general scarring models have a simple interpretation in terms of quantum clock operators, which allows to decompose their dynamics into a period of nearly free clock precession and an interacting bottleneck, shedding light on their anomalously slow thermalization when quenched from special initial states.