Enhanced many-body quantum scars from the non-Hermitian Fock skin effect

Abstract

In contrast with extended Bloch waves, a single particle can become spatially localized due to the so-called skin effect originating from non-Hermitian pumping. Here we show that in kinetically-constrained many-body systems, the skin effect can instead manifest as dynamical amplification within the Fock space, beyond the intuitively expected and previously studied particle localization and clustering. We exemplify this non-Hermitian Fock skin effect in an asymmetric version of the PXP model and show that it gives rise to ergodicity-breaking eigenstates, the non-Hermitian analogs of quantum many-body scars. A distinguishing feature of these non-Hermitian scars is their enhanced robustness against external disorders. We propose an experimental realization of the non-Hermitian scar enhancement in a tilted Bose-Hubbard optical lattice with laser-induced loss. Additionally, we implement digital simulations of such scar enhancement on the IBM quantum processor. Our results show that the Fock skin effect provides a powerful tool for creating robust non-ergodic states in generic open quantum systems.