Atypical energy eigenstates in the Hubbard chain and quantum disentangled liquids

We investigate the implications of integrability for the existence of quantum disentangled liquid (QDL) states in the half-filled one-dimensional Hubbard model. We argue that there exist finite energy-density eigenstates that exhibit QDL behaviour in the sense of Grover & Fisher (2014 J. Stat. Mech. 2014 , P10010. ( doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2014/10/P10010 )). These states are atypical in the sense that their entropy density is smaller than that of thermal states at the same energy density. Furthermore, we show that thermal states in a particular temperature window exhibit a weaker form of the QDL property, in agreement with recent results obtained by strong-coupling expansion methods in Veness et al. (2016 ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02075 )). This article is part of the themed issue ‘Breakdown of ergodicity in quantum systems: from solids to synthetic matter’.