Embedding semiclassical periodic orbits into chaotic many-body Hamiltonians

Abstract

Protecting coherent quantum dynamics from chaotic environment is key to realizations of fragile many-body phenomena and their applications in quantum technology. We present a general construction that embeds a desired periodic orbit into a family of non-integrable many-body Hamiltonians, whose dynamics is otherwise chaotic. Our construction is based on time dependent variational principle that projects quantum dynamics onto a manifold of low-entangled states, and it complements earlier approaches for embedding non-thermal eigenstates, known as quantum many-body scars, into thermalizing spectra. By designing terms that suppress "leakage" of the dynamics outside the variational manifold, we engineer families of Floquet models that host exact scarred dynamics, as we illustrate using a driven Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki model and a recent experimental realization of scars in a dimerized superconducting qubit chain.