English

Kinetically constrained freezing transition in a dipole-conserving system

Statistical Mechanics 2020-06-23 v3 Quantum Gases Quantum Physics

Abstract

We study a stochastic lattice gas of particles in one dimension with strictly finite-range interactions that respect the fracton-like conservation laws of total charge and dipole moment. As the charge density is varied, the connectivity of the system's charge configurations under the dynamics changes qualitatively. We find two distinct phases: Near half filling the system thermalizes subdiffusively, with almost all configurations belonging to a single dynamically connected sector. As the charge density is tuned away from half filling there is a phase transition to a frozen phase where locally active finite bubbles cannot exchange particles and the system fails to thermalize. The two phases exemplify what has recently been referred to as weak and strong Hilbert space fragmentation, respectively. We study the static and dynamic scaling properties of this weak-to-strong fragmentation phase transition in a kinetically constrained classical Markov circuit model, obtaining some conjectured exact critical exponents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.00096,
  title  = {Kinetically constrained freezing transition in a dipole-conserving system},
  author = {Alan Morningstar and Vedika Khemani and David A. Huse},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.00096},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

12 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; added new Appendix and additional results in v2; added new Appendix and clarified explanations in v3; published in Physical Review B

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:34:30.728Z