Observation of quantum information collapse-and-revival in a strongly-interacting Rydberg atom array

Abstract

Abstract Interactions of isolated quantum many-body systems typically scramble local information into the entire system and make it unrecoverable. Ergodicity-breaking systems possess the potential to exhibit fundamentally different information scrambling dynamics beyond this paradigm. For many-body localized systems with strong ergodicity breaking, local transport vanishes and information scrambles logarithmically slowly. Whereas in Rydberg atom arrays, local qubit flips induce dynamical retardation on surrounding qubits through the blockade effect, potentially leading to unconventional quantum information scrambling behaviours. Here, we present the measurements of out-of-time-ordered correlators and Holevo information in a Rydberg atom array, enabling us to precisely track quantum information scrambling and transport dynamics. By leveraging these tools, we observe a spatio-temporal collapse-and-revival behaviour of quantum information, which differs from both typical chaotic and many-body localized systems. Our experiment sheds light on the unique information dynamics in many-body systems with kinetic constraints, and demonstrates an effective digital-analogue approach to coherently reverse time evolution and steer information propagation in near-term quantum devices.