Fractonic Quantum Quench in Dipole-constrained Bosons

Abstract: We investigate the quench dynamics in the dipolar Bose-Hubbard model (DBHM) in one dimension. The boson hopping is constrained by dipole conservation and show fractonic dynamics. The ground states at large Hubbard interaction $U$ are Mott insulators at integer filling and a period-2 charge density wave (CDW) at half-integer filling. We focus on Mott-to-Mott and CDW-to-CDW quenches and find that dipole correlation spreading shows the light-cone behavior with the Lieb-Robinson (LR) velocity proportional to the dipole kinetic energy $J$ and the square of the density in the case of Mott quench at integer filling. Effective model for post-quench dynamics is constructed under the dilute-dipole approximation and fits the numerical results well. For CDW quench we observe a much reduced LR velocity of order $J^2/U$ and additional periodic features in the time direction. The emergence of CDW ground state and the reduced LR velocity at half-integer filling can both be understood by careful application of the second-order perturbation theory. The oscillatory behavior arises from quantum scars in the quadrupole sector of the spectrum and is captured by a PXP-like model that we derive by projecting the DBHM to the quadrupolar sector of the Hilbert space.