Eigenstate thermalization and disappearance of quantum many-body scar states in weakly interacting fermion systems

Abstract

The recent discovery of quantum many-body scar states has revealed the possibility of having states with low entanglement that violate the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in nonintegrable systems. Eigenstates with low entanglement entropy are rare but naturally exist in the integrable system of free fermions. Here, we demonstrate analytically that these atypical states would be always eliminated when an arbitrary weak interaction is introduced between the fermions. In particular, we show that the probability of having a many-body scar state with entanglement entropy satisfying a sub-volume scaling law decreases double exponentially as the system size. Thus, our results provide a quantitative argument for the disappearance of scar states in interacting fermion systems.