Variational manifolds for ground states and scarred dynamics of blockade-constrained spin models on two and three dimensional lattices

Abstract: We introduce a variational manifold of simple tensor network states for the study of a family of constrained models that describe spin-1/2 systems as realized by Rydberg atom arrays. Our manifold permits analytical calculation via perturbative expansion of one- and two-point functions in arbitrary spatial dimensions and allows for efficient computation of the matrix elements required for variational energy minimization and variational time evolution in up to three dimensions. We apply this framework to the PXP model on the hypercubic lattice in one, two, and three dimensions and show that, in each case, it exhibits quantum phase transitions breaking the sublattice symmetry in equilibrium, and hosts quantum many-body scars out of equilibrium. We demonstrate that our variational ansatz qualitatively captures all these phenomena and predicts key quantities with an accuracy that increases with the dimensionality of the lattice, and conclude that our method can be interpreted as a generalization of mean-field theory to constrained spin models.

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