English

Ergodicity breaking provably robust to arbitrary perturbations

Statistical Mechanics 2024-01-24 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

We present a new route to ergodicity breaking via Hilbert space fragmentation that displays an unprecedented level of robustness. Our construction relies on a single emergent (prethermal) conservation law. In the limit when the conservation law is exact, we prove the emergence of Hilbert space fragmentation with an exponential number of frozen configurations. We further prove that every frozen configuration is absolutely stable to arbitrary perturbations, to all finite orders in perturbation theory. In particular, our proof is not limited to symmetric perturbations, or to perturbations with compact support, but also applies to perturbations with long-range tails, and even to arbitrary geometrically nonlocal kk-body perturbations, as long as k/L0k/L \rightarrow 0 in the thermodynamic limit, where LL is linear system size. Additionally, we identify one-form U(1)U(1) charges characterizing some non-frozen sectors, and discuss the dynamics starting from typical initial conditions, which we argue is best interpreted in terms of the magnetohydrodynamics of the emergent one-form symmetry.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.03966,
  title  = {Ergodicity breaking provably robust to arbitrary perturbations},
  author = {David T. Stephen and Oliver Hart and Rahul M. Nandkishore},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.03966},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

5+9 pages, 2+10 figures; v2 includes updated supplement

R2 v1 2026-06-28T00:58:40.269Z