SKM 2023 – scientific programme

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SYSD: Symposium SKM Dissertation Prize 2023

SYSD 1: SKM Dissertation Prize

SYSD 1.5: Invited Talk

Monday, March 27, 2023, 11:30–12:00, HSZ 04

The role of unconventional symmetries in the dynamics of many-body systems — •Pablo Sala — California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena, United States

Symmetries are essential to classify equilibrium phases of matter and to explain how thermal equilibrium is attained. In this talk, we explore the role that certain unconventional symmetries play in the dynamics of many-body systems.

To begin with, we show that the conservation of a charge and its associated dipole moment leads to a provable fragmentation of the Hilbert space into exponentially many disconnected sectors. In turn, this can translate into non-vanishing bulk correlators and the existence of localized among other unexpected phenomena. In general, we find that this conservation leads to novel universal hydrodynamic behavior, which can coexist with initial states that avoid thermalization, hence providing examples of weak ergodicity breaking.

We then show that dipole-conserving models become good approximations of strongly-tilted interacting systems. In fact, the high level of control of current experimental platforms makes these phenomena accessible to present-day experiments. We use our previous insights to analyze experimental results obtained via ultracold atoms, where the system is observed to remain localized at accessible times.

We conclude by revisiting the notion of symmetry from a broader perspective. In particular, we inquire about what spatially-modulated symmetries a system can have, providing a novel approach to realize some of them.