Quantum Many-Body Scars for Arbitrary Integer Spin in 2+1D Abelian Gauge Theories

Abstract

The existence of Quantum Many-Body Scars, which prevents thermalization from certain initial states after a long time, has been established across different quantum many-body systems. These include gauge theories corresponding to spin-1/2 quantum link models. Establishing quantum scars in gauge theories with high spin is not accessible with existing numerical methods, which rely on exact diagonalization. We systematically identify scars for pure gauge theories with arbitrarily large integer spin $S$ in $2+1$D, where the electric field is restricted to $2S+1$ states per link. Through an explicit analytic construction, we show that the presence of scars is widespread in $2+1$D gauge theories for arbitrary integer spin. We confirm these findings numerically for small truncated spin and $S=1$ quantum link models. Our analytic construction establishes the presence of scars far beyond volumes and spins that can be probed with existing numerical methods and can guide quantum simulation experiments toward interesting non-equilibrium phenomena, inaccessible otherwise.