Hidden Z₂times Z₂ subspace symmetry protection for quantum scars

We study the paradigmatic spin-1 XY chain under open boundary conditions, which hosts exact quantum many-body scars generated by an emergent Spectrum Generating Algebra (SGA). We show that the scar subspace possesses a symmetry-protected trivial (SPt) character that we attribute to a hidden Z₂times Z₂ symmetry of another model, namely the commutant Hamiltonian, for which the scars are the ground states. We construct a Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM) type twist operator, which, for scar states, takes the value -1, and, for ergodic states, approaches zero in the thermodynamic limit. A complementary understanding of the stability of the scars under different perturbations is obtained by analyzing the Loschmidt echo and Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) of the scars. Finite-size scaling analysis of the QFI reveals that the scars are much more sensitive to perturbations as compared to the nearby thermal states. Based on the analysis of QFI and different LSM twist operators, we obtain a classification of different SGA-preserving and SGA-breaking perturbations.