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Published January 1, 2018 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Absence of thermalization in finite isolated interacting Floquet systems

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that the long-time behavior of isolated interacting periodically driven (Floquet) systems is a featureless maximal-entropy state characterized by an infinite temperature. Efforts to thwart this uninteresting fixed point include adding sufficient disorder to realize a Floquet many-body localized phase or working in a narrow region of drive frequencies to achieve glassy nonthermal behavior at long time. Here we show that in clean systems the Floquet eigenstates can exhibit nonthermal behavior due to finite system size. We consider a one-dimensional system of spinless fermions with nearest-neighbor interactions where the interaction term is driven. Interestingly, even with no static component of the interaction, the quasienergy spectrum contains gaps and a significant fraction of the Floquet eigenstates, at all quasienergies, have nonthermal average doublon densities. We show that this nonthermal behavior arises due to emergent integrability at large interaction strength and discuss how the integrability breaks down with power-law dependence on system size.

Additional Information

© 2018 American Physical Society. Received 8 November 2017; revised manuscript received 6 January 2018; published 29 January 2018. The authors would like to thank J. Garrison, M. Bukov, A. Polkovnikov, E. van Nieuwenburg, Y. Baum, M.-F. Tu, and J. Moore for insightful discussions. M.K. acknowledges funding from Laboratory Directed Research and Development from Berkeley Laboratory, provided by the Director, Office of Science, of the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DEAC02-05CH11231, and from the US DOE, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, as part of the TIMES initiative. G.R. and K.S. are grateful for support from the NSF through DMR-1410435, the Institute of Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Frontier center funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Packard Foundation, and from the ARO MURI W911NF-16-1-0361 "Quantum Materials by Design with Electromagnetic Excitation" sponsored by the US Army. K.S. is additionally grateful for support from NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. P.T. is supported by a National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship, and acknowledges funding from ARL CDQI, NSF PFC at JQI, ARO, AFOSR, ARO MURI, and NSF QIS.

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Published - PhysRevB.97.014311.pdf

Submitted - 1710.09843.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023