The result that a quantum many-body system hosting quantum many-body scars (QMBS), when opened to a Markovian (Lindblad) bath with suitably engineered dissipation, is not simply delocalized and thermalized by the environment but instead relaxes to a steady state dominated by the nonthermal scar subspace. This promotes a recently proposed dissipation-induced localization mechanism, first identified for many-body localization, to the weak-ergodicity-breaking QMBS setting. For appropriately prepared initial states the dissipative dynamics retain dynamic (coherent) revivals, and the authors propose a cold-atom realization of the controlled dissipation, making ergodicity breaking observable in open-system dynamics and offering a route to preparing stable scars.
Isolated quantum many-body systems normally thermalize (quantum ergodicity), scrambling local information across the whole Hilbert space. Quantum many-body scars (QMBS) are a weak form of ergodicity …