Hilbert Space Fragmentation and Exact Scars of Generalized Fredkin Spin Chains

Abstract: In this work, based on the Fredkin spin chain, we introduce a family of spin-$1/2$ many-body Hamiltonians with a three-site interaction featuring a fragmented Hilbert space with coexisting quantum many-body scars. The fragmentation results from an emergent kinetic constraint resembling the conserved spin configuration in the 1D Fermi-Hubbard model in the infinite onsite repulsion limit. To demonstrate the many-body scars, we construct an exact eigenstate that is in the middle of the spectrum within each fractured sub-sector displaying either logarithmic or area-law entanglement entropy. The interplay between fragmentation and scarring leads to rich tunable non-ergodic dynamics by quenching different initial states that is shown through large scale matrix product state simulations. In addition, we provide a Floquet quantum circuit that displays non-ergodic dynamics as a result of sharing the same fragmentation structure and scarring as the Hamiltonian.