Periodic (Floquet) driving enables Hamiltonian engineering and nonequilibrium phases, but interacting systems eventually heat by absorbing energy from the drive. Disorder can greatly delay this process, yielding long-lived prethermal plateaus. Here we show that this protection can fail when pulse-train control introduces a second driving frequency and when the disorder fluctuates. Using a natural-abundance 13C nuclear-spin network in diamond, we observe sharp peaks in the late-time heating rate at the double- and triple-spin-flip resonance conditions predicted by bimodal Floquet interference, and track their evolution with drive frequency. A switching-noise model attributes the resonant absorption to stochastic electron-spin dynamics that intermittently tune rare nuclear clusters into multi-photon resonance. Our results reveal a resonance-activated limit for disorder-stabilized Floquet phases and suggest new routes to DC-field quantum sensing based on an abrupt breakdown of prethermalization.
We show that the probability distribution of the stationary state of a dissipative ac-driven two-level system exhibits discontinuities, i.e. jumps, for parameters at which coherent destruction of tunneling takes place. These discontinuities can be observed as jumps in the emission of the Mollow triplet. The jumps are the consequence of discontinuities in the transition rates, which we calculate numerically and analytically based on the secular Floquet-Redfield formalism.
Floquet-Magnus (FM) expansion theory is a powerful tool in periodically driven (Floquet) systems under high-frequency drives. In closed systems, it dictates that their stroboscopic dynamics under a time-periodic Hamiltonian is well captured by the FM expansion, which gives a static effective Hamiltonian. On the other hand, in dissipative systems driven by a time-periodic Liouvillian, it remains an important and nontrivial problem whether the FM expansion gives a static Liouvillian describing continuous-time Markovian dynamics, which we refer to as the Liouvillianity of the FM expansion. We ans…
We study heating dynamics in isolated quantum many-body systems driven periodically at high frequency and large amplitude. Combining the high-frequency expansion for the Floquet Hamiltonian with Fermi's golden rule (FGR), we develop a master equation termed the Floquet FGR. Unlike the conventional one, the Floquet FGR correctly describes heating dynamics, including the prethermalization regime, even for strong drives, under which the Floquet Hamiltonian is significantly dressed, and nontrivial Floquet engineering is present. The Floquet FGR depends on system size only weakly, enabling us to an…
We theoretically investigate the collisional heating of a cold atom system subjected to time-periodic forces. We show within the Floquet framework that this heating rate due to two-body collisions has a general semiclassical expression $\mathcal{P}\propto ρσv_{\rm col} E_0$, depending on the kinetic energy $E_0$ associated with the shaking, particle number density $ρ$, elastic collision cross section $σ$, and an effective collisional velocity $v_{\rm col}$ determined by the dominant energy scale in the system. We further show that the collisional heating is suppressed by Pauli blocking in cold…
Periodically driven quantum systems suffer from heating via resonant excitation. While such Floquet heating guides a generic isolated system towards the infinite-temperature state, a driven open system, coupled to a thermal bath, will approach a non-equilibrium steady state. We show that the interplay of bath-induced dissipation and controlled Floquet heating can give rise to non-equilibrium Bose condensation in a mode protected from Floquet heating. In particular, we consider a one-dimensional (1D) Bose gas in an optical lattice of finite extent, which is coupled weakly to a three-dimensional…
We analyze the dynamics of periodically-driven (Floquet) Hamiltonians with short- and long-range interactions, finding clear evidence for a thermalization time, $τ^*$, that increases exponentially with the drive frequency. We observe this behavior, both in systems with short-ranged interactions, where our results are consistent with rigorous bounds, and in systems with long-range interactions, where such bounds do not exist at present. Using a combination of heating and entanglement dynamics, we explicitly extract the effective energy scale controlling the rate of thermalization. Finally, we d…
The manipulation of many-body systems often involves time-dependent forces that cause unwanted heating. One strategy to suppress heating is to use time-periodic (Floquet) forces at large driving frequencies. For quantum spin systems with bounded spectra, it was shown rigorously that the heating rate is exponentially small in the driving frequency. Recently, the exponential suppression of heating has also been observed in an experiment with ultracold atoms, realizing a periodically driven Bose-Hubbard model. This model has an unbounded spectrum and, hence, is beyond the reach of previous theore…
The concept of Floquet engineering is to subject a quantum system to time-periodic driving in such a way that it acquires interesting novel properties. It has been employed, for instance, for the realization of artificial magnetic fluxes in optical lattices and, typically, it is based on two approximations. First, the driving frequency is assumed to be low enough to suppress resonant excitations to high-lying states above some energy gap separating a low energy subspace from excited states. Second, the driving frequency is still assumed to be large compared to the energy scales of the low-ener…
We report the observation of long-lived Floquet prethermal states in a bulk solid composed of dipolar-coupled $^{13}$C nuclei in diamond at room temperature. For precessing nuclear spins prepared in an initial transverse state, we demonstrate pulsed spin-lock Floquet control that prevents their decay over multiple-minute long periods. We observe Floquet prethermal lifetimes $T_2'\approx$90.9s, extended >60,000-fold over the nuclear free induction decay times. The spins themselves are continuously interrogated for $\sim$10min, corresponding to the application of $\approx$5.8M control pulses. Th…
The non-Hermiticity caused breakdown of the bulk-boundary correspondence (BBC) in topological phase transition was cured by the skin effect for the systems with chiral symmetry and translation invariance. However, periodic driving, as an active tool in engineering exotic topological phases, breaks the chiral symmetry, and the inevitable disorder destroys the translation invariance. Here, we propose a scheme to retrieve the BBC and establish a complete description of the topological phases of the periodically driven non-Hermitian system both with and without the translation invariance. The demo…
Periodic driving has emerged as a powerful tool in the quest to engineer new and exotic quantum phases. While driven many-body systems are generically expected to absorb energy indefinitely and reach an infinite-temperature state, the rate of heating can be exponentially suppressed when the drive frequency is large compared to the local energy scales of the system -- leading to long-lived 'prethermal' regimes. In this work, we experimentally study a bosonic cloud of ultracold atoms in a driven optical lattice and identify such a prethermal regime in the Bose-Hubbard model. By measuring the ene…
Periodic driving of optical lattices has enabled the creation of novel bandstructures not realizable in static lattice systems, such as topological bands for neutral particles. However, especially driven systems of interacting bosonic particles often suffer from strong heating. We have systematically studied heating in an interacting Bose-Einstein condensate in a driven one-dimensional optical lattice. We find interaction-dependent heating rates that depend both on the scattering length and the driving strength and identify the underlying resonant intra- and interband scattering processes. By …
Floquet spin chains have been a venue for understanding topological states of matter that are qualitatively different from their static counterparts by, for example, hosting $π$ edge modes that show stable period-doubled dynamics. However the stability of these edge modes to interactions has traditionally required the system to be many-body localized in order to suppress heating. In contrast, here we show that even in the absence of disorder, and in the presence of bulk heating, $π$ edge modes are long lived. Their lifetime is extracted from exact diagonalization and is found to be non-perturb…
We investigate multi-"photon" interband excitation processes in an optical lattice that is driven periodically in time by a modulation of the lattice depth. Assuming the system to be prepared in the lowest band, we compute the excitation spectrum numerically. Moreover, we estimate the effective coupling parameters for resonant interband excitation processes analytically, employing degenerate perturbation theory in Floquet space. We find that below a threshold driving strength, interband excitations are suppressed exponentially with respect to the inverse driving frequency. For sufficiently low…
Converting $PT$-Symmetric Topological Classes by Floquet Engineering
Key Laboratory of Quantum Theory and Applications of Ministry of Education, Lanzhou Center for Theoretical Physics, Gansu Provincial Research Center for Basic Disciplines of Quantum Physics, Key Laboratory of Theoretical Physics of Gansu Province, Lanzhou University（兰州大学）
A tremendous amount of recent attention has focused on characterizing the dynamical properties of periodically driven many-body systems. Here, we use a novel numerical tool termed `density matrix truncation' (DMT) to investigate the late-time dynamics of large-scale Floquet systems. We find that DMT accurately captures two essential pieces of Floquet physics, namely, prethermalization and late-time heating to infinite temperature. Moreover, by implementing a spatially inhomogeneous drive, we demonstrate that an interplay between Floquet heating and diffusive transport is crucial to understandi…
We theoretically investigate basic properties of nonequilibrium steady states of periodically-driven open quantum systems based on the full solution of the Maxwell-Bloch equation. In a resonantly driving condition, we find that the transverse relaxation, also known as decoherence, significantly destructs the formation of Floquet states while the longitudinal relaxation does not directly affect it. Furthermore, by evaluating the quasienergy spectrum of the nonequilibrium steady states, we demonstrate that the Rabi splitting can be observed as long as the decoherence time is as short as one thir…
Periodically driven Floquet quantum systems provide a promising platform to investigate novel physics out of equilibrium. Unfortunately, the drive generically heats up the system to a featureless infinite temperature state. For large driving frequency, the heat absorption rate is predicted to be exponentially small, giving rise to a long-lived prethermal regime which exhibits all the intriguing properties of Floquet systems. Here we experimentally observe Floquet prethermalization using nuclear magnetic resonance techniques. We first show the relaxation of a far-from-equilibrium initial state …
We demonstrate that the prethermal regime of periodically driven (Floquet), classical many-body systems can host nonequilibrium phases of matter. In particular, we show that there exists an effective Hamiltonian that captures the dynamics of ensembles of classical trajectories despite the breakdown of this description at the single trajectory level. In addition, we prove that the effective Hamiltonian can host emergent symmetries protected by the discrete time-translation symmetry of the drive. The spontaneous breaking of such an emergent symmetry leads to a subharmonic response, characteristi…
Based on the PXP model adapted for Rydberg-blockaded chains, we investigate dynamics of topological domain walls between different quantum many-body scar states of $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry. It is found that, the domain walls not only possess oscillating features of scars but also manifest longstanding bipartite entanglement with exactly unchanged flip-flop phase difference, suggesting their potential as quantum information resource. A periodically driven field is exerted and the high-frequency drive gives rise to a phase transition from prethermalization to Floquet localization. In order to inv…
Quantum many-body scars have attracted much interest as a violation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) due to recent experimental observation in Rydberg atoms and related theoretical studies. In this paper, we construct a model hosting exact Floquet quantum many-body scars, which violate the Floquet version of ETH. We consider two uniformly-driven static Hamiltonians prohibiting neighboring up spins (Rydberg blockade) like the PXP model, and construct a binary drive composed of them. We show that there exists a four-dimensional subspace which completely avoids thermalization to …
Second-order topological insulator (SOTI) is featured with the presence of $(d-2)$-dimensional boundary states in $d$-dimension systems. The non-Hermiticity induced breakdown of bulk-boundary correspondence (BBC) and the periodic driving on systems generally obscure the description of non-Hermitian SOTI. To prompt the applications of SOTIs, we explore the role of periodic driving in controllably creating exotic non-Hermitian SOTIs both for 2D and 3D systems. A scheme to retrieve the BBC and a complete description to SOTIs via the bulk topology of such nonequilibrium systems are proposed. It is…
Local-to-Global Entanglement Dynamics by Periodically Driving Impurities
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；Bard College（巴德学院）；School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study（高等研究院自然科学院）；École Normale Supérieure (ENS)（巴黎高等师范学院）
Ultracold atomic gas provides a useful tool to explore many-body physics. One of the recent additions to this experimental toolbox is the Floquet engineering, where periodic modulation of the Hamiltonian allows the creation of effective potentials that do not exist otherwise. When subject to external modulations, however, generic interacting many-body systems absorb energy, thus posing a heating problem that may impair the usefulness of this method. For discrete systems with bounded local energy, an exponentially suppressed heating rate with the driving frequency has been observed previously, …
We consider a clean quantum system subject to strong periodic driving. The existence of a dominant energy scale, $h_D^x$, can generate considerable structure in an effective description of a system which, in the absence of the drive, is non-integrable, interacting, and does not host localization. In particular, we uncover points of freezing in the space of drive parameters (frequency and amplitude). At those points, the dynamics is severely constrained due to the emergence of an almost exact local conserved quantity, which scars the {\it entire} Floquet spectrum by preventing the system from h…
The Dicke model, which describes the coupling of an ensemble of spins to a harmonic oscillator, is known for its superradiant phase transition, which can both be observed in the ground state in a purely Hamiltonian setting, as well as in the steady state of an open-system Dicke model with dissipation. We demonstrate that, in addition, the dissipative Dicke model can undergo a second phase transition to a nonstationary phase, characterized by unlimited heating of the harmonic oscillator. Identifying the mechanism of the phase transition and deriving the scaling of the critical coupling with the…
We investigate numerically and analytically the heating process in ergodic clusters of interacting spins 1/2 subjected to periodic pulses of external magnetic field. Our findings indicate that there is a threshold for the pulse strength below which the heating is suppressed. This threshold decreases with the increase of the cluster size, approaching zero in the thermodynamic limit; yet it should be observable in clusters with fairly large Hilbert spaces. We obtain the above threshold quantitatively as a condition for the breakdown of the golden rule in the second-order perturbation theory. It …
We investigate a heating phenomenon in periodically driven integrable systems that can be mapped to free-fermion models. We find that heating to the high-temperature state, which is a typical scenario in non-integrable systems, can also appear in integrable time-periodic systems; the amount of energy absorption rises drastically near a frequency threshold where the Floquet-Magnus expansion diverges. As the driving period increases, we also observe that the effective temperatures of the generalized Gibbs ensemble for conserved quantities go to infinity. By the use of the scaling analysis, we re…
We propose and analyze two distinct routes toward realizing interacting symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases via periodic driving. First, we demonstrate that a driven transverse-field Ising model can be used to engineer complex interactions which enable the emulation of an equilibrium SPT phase. This phase remains stable only within a parametric time scale controlled by the driving frequency, beyond which its topological features break down. To overcome this issue, we consider an alternate route based upon realizing an intrinsically Floquet SPT phase that does not have any equilibrium a…
We propose the implementation of a quantum heat pump with ultracold atoms. It is based on two periodically driven coherently coupled quantum dots using ultracold atoms. Each dot possesses two relevant quantum states and is coupled to a fermionic reservoir. The working principle is based on energy-selective driving-induced resonant tunneling processes, where a particle that tunnels from one dot to the other either absorbs or emits the energy quantum $\hbarω$ associated with the driving frequency, depending on its energy. We characterize the device using Floquet theory and compare simple analyti…
The use of periodic driving for synthesizing many-body quantum states depends crucially on the existence of a prethermal regime, which exhibits drive-tunable properties while forestalling the effects of heating. This motivates the search for direct experimental probes of the underlying localized nonergodic nature of the wave function in this metastable regime. We report experiments on a many-body Floquet system consisting of atoms in an optical lattice subjected to ultrastrong sign-changing amplitude modulation. Using a double-quench protocol we measure an inverse participation ratio quantifyi…
The nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of closed many-body systems is a rich yet challenging field. While recent progress for periodically driven (Floquet) systems has yielded a number of rigorous results, our understanding on quantum many-body systems driven by rapidly varying but a- and quasi-periodic driving is still limited. Here, we derive rigorous, non-perturbative, bounds on the heating rate in quantum many-body systems under Thue-Morse quasi-periodic driving and under random multipolar driving, the latter being a tunably randomized variant of the former. In the process, we derive a static…
Watching a Superconducting Coplanar Waveguide Heat Up with a Single Color Center
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Physikalisches Institut (PHI)（物理研究所）；Institute for Quantum Materials and Technologies (IQMT)（量子材料与技术研究所）
We give a systematic review of the adiabatic theorem and the leading non-adiabatic corrections in periodically-driven (Floquet) systems. These corrections have a two-fold origin: (i) conventional ones originating from the gradually changing Floquet Hamiltonian and (ii) corrections originating from changing the micro-motion operator. These corrections conspire to give a Hall-type linear response for non-stroboscopic (time-averaged) observables allowing one to measure the Berry curvature and the Chern number related to the Floquet Hamiltonian, thus extending these concepts to periodically-driven…
We study the dynamics of isolated interacting spin chains that are periodically driven by sudden quenches. Using full exact diagonalization of finite chains, we show that these systems exhibit three distinct regimes. For short driving periods, the Floquet Hamiltonian is well approximated by the time-averaged Hamiltonian, while for long periods the evolution operator exhibits properties of random matrices of a Circular Ensemble (CE). In-between, there is a crossover regime. Based on a finite-size scaling analysis and analytic arguments we argue that, for thermodynamically large systems and non-…
The conventional framework for defining and understanding phases of matter requires thermodynamic equilibrium. Extensions to non-equilibrium systems have led to surprising insights into the nature of many-body thermalization and the discovery of novel phases of matter, often catalyzed by driving the system periodically. The inherent heating from such Floquet drives can be tempered by including strong disorder in the system, but this can also mask the generality of non-equilibrium phases. In this work, we utilize a trapped-ion quantum simulator to observe signatures of a non-equilibrium driven …
