Exploring a fracton model through Floquet engineering of four-body ring-exchange interactions
Phys. Rev. A 113, 012605 – Published 5 January, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/pmwj-z7l2
Abstract
The study of unique entangled states has recently garnered much attention for characterizing unconventional condensed matter phases and phase transitions beyond the Landau symmetry-breaking paradigm. In this work, we propose to investigate a fracton model through periodically modulating the four-body ring-exchange interactions. We study the entanglement structure of the ground state and uncover that the engineered model exhibits long-range entanglement at the critical point, characterized by the conditional mutual information and central charge of conformal field theory. The anomalous transport properties of the fracton model with quench dynamics demonstrate the Hilbert-space fragmentation and restricted mobility of the fracton excitations. Additionally, we extend the model to a square lattice under open boundary conditions to showcase the presence of a symmetry-protected corner state, a distributed Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state. Our work provides a promising way to study fracton models with Floquet engineering in state-of-the-art quantum simulation experiments and opens new possibilities for exploring diverse and uncharted quantum phases in these systems.
