Quantum Many-body scars, unstable classical periodic orbits and Arnold diffusion

In this talk, I will discuss quantum many-body scars, a phenomenon recently observed in a number of physical systems. We will explore the connection between quantum many-body scars and unstable periodic trajectories, revisiting the original concept of scars introduced by Heller in 1986. The systems considered are chaotic spin chains with short-range interactions, both classical and quantum. On the classical side, the chosen periodic trajectories are such that all spins instantaneously point in the same direction, which evolves as a function of time. We find that the largest Lyapunov exponents characterising the stabillity of these trajectories have surprisingly strong and nontrivial dependencies on the interaction constants and chain lengths. We also find that instabilities around periodic trajectories in modestly large spin chains develop into a transient nearly quasiperiodic non-ergodic regime. In some cases, the lifetime of this regime is extremely long, which we interpret as a manifestation of Arnold diffusion in the vicinity of integrable dynamics. On the quantum side, we numerically investigate the dynamics of quantum states starting with all spins initially pointing in the same direction: these are the quantum counterparts of the initial conditions for the above periodic classical trajectories. Our investigation reveals the existence of quantum many-body scars for numerically accessible finite chains of spins 3/2 and higher. No evidence of quantum scars was observed for spin-1/2 chains, while spin-1 chains were found to be transitional in this respect. The dynamic thermalization process dominated by quantum scars is shown to exhibit a slowdown in comparison with generic thermalization at the same energy.