Emergent symmetries and slow quantum dynamics in a Rydberg-atom chain with confinement

TL;DR

This paper investigates how emergent symmetries in a Rydberg-atom chain under strong external fields lead to slow quantum dynamics, revealing new algebraic structures and connections to many-body scars and confinement phenomena.

Contribution

It uncovers a second emergent symmetry in the PXP model under strong fields and develops a nested Schrieffer-Wolff perturbation theory to explain slow dynamics and relaxation times.

Findings

Identification of a second emergent symmetry in the PXP model.

Development of a nested Schrieffer-Wolff perturbation theory.

Observation of dramatically slowed dynamics due to interplay of symmetries.

Abstract

Rydberg atoms in optical tweezer arrays provide a playground for nonequilibrium quantum many-body physics. The PXP model describes the dynamics of such systems in the strongly interacting Rydberg blockade regime and notably exhibits weakly nonergodic dynamics due to quantum many-body scars. Here, we study the PXP model in a strong staggered external field, which has been proposed to manifest quasiparticle confinement in light of a mapping to a lattice gauge theory. We characterize this confining regime using both numerical exact diagonalization and perturbation theory around the strong-field limit. In addition to the expected emergent symmetry generated by the staggered field, we find a second emergent symmetry that is special to the PXP model. The interplay between these emergent symmetries and the Rydberg blockade constraint dramatically slows down the system's dynamics beyond naive expectations. We devise a nested Schrieffer-Wolff perturbation theory to properly account for the new emergent symmetry and show that this treatment is essential to understand the numerically observed relaxation time scales. We also discuss connections to Hilbert space fragmentation and trace the origin of the new emergent symmetry to a "nearly-$SU(2)$" algebra discovered in the context of many-body scarring.