Effects of the symmetries and related orders to the thermalization of many-body localized system

TL;DR

This paper explores how symmetries and topological orders influence thermalization and localization in many-body quantum systems, highlighting the roles of degeneracy, quantum scars, and symmetry protection in complex fermionic and spin models.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of symmetry effects on thermalization, localization, and quantum scars in one-dimensional fermion chains with SYK interactions, extending understanding of ETH violation.

Findings

Symmetries protect topological orders against thermalization.

Degenerate ETH-violated states are found in specific models.

Quantum scars emerge in enlarged Hilbert spaces with bosonic flavors.

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the effects of the symmetries and related topological orders to the thermalization of many-body localized system. We consider the one-dimensional fermion chain system with open (or periodic) boundary condition, whose boundaries are characterized by Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) intercation. Just like in the SYK model and the tendor models, there are many-body quantum chaos in out-of-time-ordered correlation when the system is being thermalized by the interactions (usually nonuniform and being randomly distributed), and satisfies the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH). While the continuous or discrete symmetries usually protect the related topological orders against the thermalization, which may lead to the localization of quantum states and generate large degeneracy. We discuss these effects in terms of the fermionic or spin languages. In many-body localized phase, a large number of degenerate ETH-violated states can be found in both the frustration-free AKLT model or the integrable biquadratic (Wishart) SYK model. The quantum scars appear when such degenerate states are embeded into an ETH-satisfying spectrum of the Hilbert space enlarged by a much larger number of bosonic flavors (e.g., SU(M) multiplets degeneracy). Usually, the emergence of quantum chaos require large limits of boson flavor M and the number of coupled (undegenerate) states (N; which related to Z N symmetry). Further, the boson (or excitations) flavor number M can often to related to the fermion number N through the duality transformations, in which case the Z M symmetry is possible to generted by SU(M) model and leads to asymptotic degeneracy in large-M limit.