Onsager's Scars in Disordered Spin Chains

Abstract

We propose a class of nonintegrable quantum spin chains that exhibit quantum many-body scars even in the presence of disorder. With the use of the so-called Onsager symmetry, we construct scarred models for arbitrary spin quantum number S. There are two types of scar states, namely, coherent states associated with an Onsager-algebra element and one-magnon scar states. While both of them are highly excited states, they have area-law entanglement and can be written as a matrix product state. Therefore, they explicitly violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis. We also investigate the dynamics of the fidelity and entanglement entropy for several initial states. The results clearly show that the scar states are trapped in a perfectly periodic orbit in the Hilbert subspace and never thermalize, whereas other generic states do rapidly. To our knowledge, our model is the first explicit example of disordered quantum many-body scarred models.