Weak ergodicity breaking without nonthermal eigenstates

Abstract

The typical mechanisms of ergodicity breaking in isolated interacting quantum systems, such as many-body localization and quantum many-body scars, originate from the nonthermal nature of the underlying eigenstates. Here, in the absence of nonthermal eigenstates, we identify a mechanism for collective revivals of multiparticle Wannier states (MWSs) associated with nearly linear bands in a spatially modulated Bose-Hubbard lattice. The MWSs, as superpositions of multiparticle Bloch states within individual energy bands, give rise to band-resolved Wannier-sector fragmentation. The key idea is that spatially periodic modulation folds and separates energy bands of a simple lattice into several sub-bands, among which nearly linear sub-bands inherit the linear segments of the original bands. Although multiparticle Bloch states satisfy the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), the MWSs in the nearly linear band still exhibit long-lived collective revivals, due to emergent equally spaced energy levels. Our work provides a route to weak ergodicity breaking in which long-lived revivals arise from spectral phase coherence among ETH-satisfying eigenstates rather than from scar-like nonthermal eigenstates.