No Arabic abstract
We establish some general dynamical properties of lattice many-body systems that are subject to a high-frequency periodic driving. We prove that such systems have a quasi-conserved extensive quantity $H_*$, which plays the role of an effective static Hamiltonian. The dynamics of the system (e.g., evolution of any local observable) is well-approximated by the evolution with the Hamiltonian $H_*$ up to time $tau_*$, which is exponentially long in the driving frequency. We further show that the energy absorption rate is exponentially small in the driving frequency. In cases where $H_*$ is ergodic, the driven system prethermalizes to a thermal state described by $H_*$ at intermediate times $tlesssim tau_*$, eventually heating up to an infinite-temperature state at times $tsim tau_*$. Our results indicate that rapidly driven many-body systems generically exhibit prethermalization and very slow heating. We briefly discuss implications for experiments which realize topological states by periodic driving.
We show that the onset of quantum chaos at infinite temperature in two many-body 1D lattice models, the perturbed spin-1/2 XXZ and Anderson models, is characterized by universal behavior. Specifically, we show that the onset of quantum chaos is marked by maxima of the typical fidelity susceptibilities that scale with the square of the inverse average level spacing, saturating their upper bound, and that the strength of the integrability/localization breaking perturbation at these maxima decreases with increasing system size. We also show that the spectral function below the Thouless energy (in the quantum-chaotic regime) diverges when approaching those maxima. Our results suggest that, in the thermodynamic limit, arbitrarily small integrability/localization breaking perturbations result in quantum chaos in the many-body quantum systems studied here.
We study the delocalization dynamics of interacting disordered hard-core bosons for quasi-1D and 2D geometries, with system sizes and time scales comparable to state-of-the-art experiments. The results are strikingly similar to the 1D case, with slow, subdiffusive dynamics featuring power-law decay. From the freezing of this decay we infer the critical disorder $W_c(L, d)$ as a function of length $L$ and width $d$. In the quasi-1D case $W_c$ has a finite large-$L$ limit at fixed $d$, which increases strongly with $d$. In the 2D case $W_c(L,L)$ grows with $L$. The results are consistent with the avalanche picture of the many-body localization transition.
We reveal a continuous dynamical heating transition between a prethermal and an infinite-temperature stage in a clean, chaotic periodically driven classical spin chain. The transition time is a steep exponential function of the drive frequency, showing that the exponentially long-lived prethermal plateau, originally observed in quantum Floquet systems, survives the classical limit. Even though there is no straightforward generalization of Floquets theorem to nonlinear systems, we present strong evidence that the prethermal physics is well described by the inverse-frequency expansion. We relate the stability and robustness of the prethermal plateau to drive-induced synchronization not captured by the expansion. Our results set the pathway to transfer the ideas of Floquet engineering to classical many-body systems, and are directly relevant for photonic crystals and cold atom experiments in the superfluid regime.
How a closed interacting quantum many-body system relaxes and dephases as a function of time is a fundamental question in thermodynamic and statistical physics. In this work, we analyse and observe the persistent temporal fluctuations after a quantum quench of a tunable long-range interacting transverse-field Ising Hamiltonian realized with a trapped-ion quantum simulator. We measure the temporal fluctuations in the average magnetization of a finite-size system of spin-$1/2$ particles. We experiment in a regime where the properties of the system are closely related to the integrable Hamiltonian with global spin-spin coupling, which enables analytical predictions even for the long-time non-integrable dynamics. The analytical expression for the temporal fluctuations predicts the exponential suppression of temporal fluctuations with increasing system size. Our measurement data is consistent with our theory predicting the regime of many-body dephasing.
The presence of flat bands is a source of localization in lattice systems. While flat bands are often unstable with respect to interactions between the particles, they can persist in certain cases. We consider a diamond ladder with transverse hopping that possesses such stable flat bands and show that many-body localization appears in the presence of interactions. We demonstrate that the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis is violated and verify localization by time evolution of local observables, revival probabilities, and participation ratios. Thus, this system appears to be an example for many-body localization without disorder.