Majorana scars as group singlets

Abstract

In some quantum many-body systems, the Hilbert space breaks up into a large ergodic sector and a much smaller scar subspace. It has been suggested [K. Pakrouski et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 230602 (2020)0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.125.230602] that the two sectors may be distinguished by their transformation properties under a large group whose rank grows with the system size (it is not a symmetry of the Hamiltonian). The quantum many-body scars are invariant under this group, while all other states are not. Here we apply this idea to lattice systems containing M Majorana fermions per site. The Hilbert space for N sites may be decomposed under the action of the SO(N)×SO(M) group, and the scars are the SO(N) singlets. For any even M there are two families of scars. One of them, which we call the η states, is symmetric under the group O(N). The other, the ζ states, has the SO(N) invariance. For M=4, where our construction reduces to spin-1/2 fermions on a lattice with local interactions, the former family are the N+1η-pairing states, while the latter are the N+1 states of maximum spin. We generalize this construction to M>4. For M=6 we exhibit explicit formulas for the scar states and use them to calculate the bipartite entanglement entropy analytically. For large N, it grows logarithmically with the subsystem size. We present a general argument that any group-invariant scars should have the entanglement entropy that is parametrically smaller than that of typical states. The energies of the scars we find are not equidistant in general but can be made so by choosing Hamiltonian parameters. For M>6 we find that with local Hamiltonians the scars typically have certain degeneracies. The scar spectrum can be made ergodic by adding a nonlocal interaction term. We derive the dimension of each scar family and show the scars could have a large contribution to the density of states for small N.