We demonstrate that the dynamics of kicked spin chains possess a remarkable duality property. The trace of the unitary evolution operator for $N$ spins at time $T$ is related to one of a non-unitary evolution operator for $T$ spins at time $N$. We investigate the spectrum of this dual operator with a focus on the different parameter regimes (chaotic, regular) of the spin chain. We present applications of this duality relation to spectral statistics in an accompanying paper.
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