Ergodicity breaking in matrix-product-state effective Hamiltonians

Abstract: Thermalization and its breakdown in interacting quantum many-body systems are governed by mid-spectrum eigenstates, which are typically accessible only in small system sizes amenable to exact diagonalization. Here we demonstrate that the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) effective Hamiltonian, an object routinely used to variationally approximate ground states, encodes detailed information about the dynamics far from equilibrium. In the random-field XXZ spin chain, the spectrum of the effective Hamiltonian is shown to capture the transition from thermal to many-body localized regimes, including spatially resolved probes of ergodic bubbles. Furthermore, the same approach also captures weak ergodicity breaking associated with quantum many-body scars. Our results establish the DMRG effective Hamiltonian as a versatile spectral probe of quantum thermalization and its breakdown in large systems beyond exact diagonalization.