Breakdown of Quantum Chaos in the Staggered-Field XXZ Chain: Confinement and Meson Formation

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Main Authors: Wildeboer, Julia, Lajer, Marton, Konik, Robert M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909911987781632
author Wildeboer, Julia
Lajer, Marton
Konik, Robert M.
author_facet Wildeboer, Julia
Lajer, Marton
Konik, Robert M.
contents Confinement of fractionalized excitations can strongly restructure many-body spectra. We investigate this phenomenon in the gapped spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ XXZ chain subject to a staggered field, where spinons bind into domain-wall ``mesons'' deep in the antiferromagnetic phase. We present evidence that this non-integrable model exhibits both Hilbert space fractionalization and quantum scar formation as controlled by the anisotropy parameter $Δ$. Exact diagonalization across symmetry-resolved sectors reveals a crossover from Gaussian-orthogonal (chaotic) level statistics at weak anisotropy $Δ\sim 1$ to non-ergodic behavior deep in the antiferromagnetic regime $Δ\gg 1$ through scrutinizing the adjacent gap ratios, accompanied by a striking banding of eigenstates by domain-wall number in correlation and entanglement measures. The Page-like entanglement dome characteristic of chaotic spectra gives way to suppressed, band-resolved entanglement consistent with emergent quasi-conservation of domain walls. To investigate further the formation mechanism of mesonic scar states, we carry out meson spectroscopy near the two-spinon threshold and compare with the analytic ladder predicted by Rutkevich [Phys. Rev. B 106, 134405 (2022)]. We test the theory through continuum-relative bindings, an offset-removed Airy scaling collapse, and explicit two-meson thresholds that determine the number of stable meson levels. The low-lying spectrum shows close quantitative agreement, while deviations at higher energies are consistent with finite-size and subleading corrections. These results establish a unified account of confinement-induced nonergodicity and provide a template for quantitative meson spectroscopy in quantum spin chains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_14847
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Breakdown of Quantum Chaos in the Staggered-Field XXZ Chain: Confinement and Meson Formation
Wildeboer, Julia
Lajer, Marton
Konik, Robert M.
Strongly Correlated Electrons
Confinement of fractionalized excitations can strongly restructure many-body spectra. We investigate this phenomenon in the gapped spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ XXZ chain subject to a staggered field, where spinons bind into domain-wall ``mesons'' deep in the antiferromagnetic phase. We present evidence that this non-integrable model exhibits both Hilbert space fractionalization and quantum scar formation as controlled by the anisotropy parameter $Δ$. Exact diagonalization across symmetry-resolved sectors reveals a crossover from Gaussian-orthogonal (chaotic) level statistics at weak anisotropy $Δ\sim 1$ to non-ergodic behavior deep in the antiferromagnetic regime $Δ\gg 1$ through scrutinizing the adjacent gap ratios, accompanied by a striking banding of eigenstates by domain-wall number in correlation and entanglement measures. The Page-like entanglement dome characteristic of chaotic spectra gives way to suppressed, band-resolved entanglement consistent with emergent quasi-conservation of domain walls. To investigate further the formation mechanism of mesonic scar states, we carry out meson spectroscopy near the two-spinon threshold and compare with the analytic ladder predicted by Rutkevich [Phys. Rev. B 106, 134405 (2022)]. We test the theory through continuum-relative bindings, an offset-removed Airy scaling collapse, and explicit two-meson thresholds that determine the number of stable meson levels. The low-lying spectrum shows close quantitative agreement, while deviations at higher energies are consistent with finite-size and subleading corrections. These results establish a unified account of confinement-induced nonergodicity and provide a template for quantitative meson spectroscopy in quantum spin chains.
title Breakdown of Quantum Chaos in the Staggered-Field XXZ Chain: Confinement and Meson Formation
topic Strongly Correlated Electrons
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14847