Sensing ac fields with quantum many-body scars

Abstract

Quantum many-body scars (MBS) exhibit weak ergodicity breaking and long-lived coherent dynamics within an otherwise thermal spectrum. We investigate their metrological properties using the quantum Fisher information (QFI), focusing on estimating the amplitude of a weak AC field in the PXP model. We show that the approximately uniform energy spacing of the scar tower enables collective resonant processes when the driving frequency matches integer multiples of the scar gap, resulting in a quadratic-in-time growth of the QFI over an extended time window. We analyze how the connectivity induced by different probe operators shapes sensing performance and demonstrate that staggered magnetization leads to a more favorable growth of the QFI with system size than homogeneous magnetization. Through frequency scanning and finite-size analysis, we characterize the scaling of the QFI with the number of particles. Finally, we develop a single-tower approximation under resonant driving, deriving a compact analytical expression that captures the time dependence and system-size scaling of the QFI. Our results establish how to leverage structured non-ergodic dynamics in quantum sensing protocols.