Long-range interacting many-body systems in the irrep basis

Spin models featuring infinite-range, homogeneous all-to-all interactions can be efficiently described due to the existence of a symmetry-restricted Hilbert subspace and an underlying classical phase-space structure. However, when the permutation invariance of the system is weakly broken, such as by long- but finite-range interactions, these tools become mathematically invalid. Here, we propose to approximately describe these scenarios by considering additional many-body subspaces according to the hierarchy of their coupling to the symmetric subspace, defined by leveraging the structure of irreducible representations (irreps) of the group SU(2). We put forward a procedure, dubbed “irrep distillation,” which defines these additional subspaces to minimize their dimension at each order of approximation. We discuss the validity of our method in connection with the occurrence of quantum many-body scars, benchmark its utility by analyzing the dynamical and equilibrium phase transitions, outline its phenomenology, and compare its use-cases against other approximations of long-range many-body systems.