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Certain BCS wavefunctions are quantum many-body scars

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2026-05-15 v3 Statistical Mechanics Superconductivity High Energy Physics - Theory Quantum Physics

Abstract

We construct many-body scar states in multi-flavour fermionic lattice models that possess strong magnetic or superconducting correlations of a given type specified by a unitary matrix AA. One of the states maximizes the one-point correlations over the full Hilbert space and has the form of the BCS wavefunction. It may always be made the ground state by adding the correlations as a "pairing potential" to any Hamiltonian supporting group-invariant scars. In our single-flavour, spin-full fermions example we consider a superconducting AA. The BCS scar ground state is a linear combination of the well-known η\eta-pairing states. In the multi-orbital fermions example the BCS-like ground state maximizes unconventional magnetic correlations. The broad class of eligible Hamiltonians includes many conventional condensed matter interactions. The part of the Hamiltonian that governs the exact dynamics of the scar subspace coincides with the BCS mean-field Hamiltonian. We therefore show that its eigenstates are many-body scars that are decoupled from the rest of the Hilbert space and thereby protected from thermalization. Our results point out a connection between the fields of superconductivity and weak ergodicity breaking (many-body scars) and will hopefully encourage further investigations. They also provide the first feasible protocol to initialize a fermionic system to a scar state in (a quantum simulator) experiment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.13651,
  title  = {Certain BCS wavefunctions are quantum many-body scars},
  author = {Kiryl Pakrouski and Zimo Sun},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.13651},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

journal accepted version, compared to v2 couple typos corrected in eqs B11-B15

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:07:03.364Z