We give a general overview of the high-frequency regime in periodically driven systems and identify three distinct classes of driving protocols in which the infinite-frequency Floquet Hamiltonian is not equal to the time-averaged Hamiltonian. These classes cover systems, such as the Kapitza pendulum, the Harper–Hofstadter model of neutral atoms in a magnetic field, the Haldane Floquet Chern insulator and others. In all setups considered, we discuss both the infinite-frequency limit and the leading finite-frequency corrections to the Floquet Hamiltonian. We provide a short overview of Floquet theory focusing on the gauge structure associated with the choice of stroboscopic frame and the differences between stroboscopic and non-stroboscopic dynamics. In the latter case, one has to work with dressed operators representing observables and a dressed density matrix. We also comment on the application of Floquet Theory to systems described by static Hamiltonians with well-separated energy scales and, in particular, discuss parallels between the inverse-frequency expansion and the Schrieffer–Wolff transformation extending the latter to driven systems.
We study the two-step Floquet dynamics of the chiral
J1-
J2-
K Heisenberg model on the
4×4 torus, alternating its non-chiral Heisenberg part
HAF and its chiral plaquette part
HK, at a parameter point where the static model hosts a quasi-degenerate, spectrally isolated chiral-spin-liquid (CSL) topological doublet. The one-period propagator is computed exactly in all symmetry sectors. Decreasing the frequency, the doublet survives the drive far beyond the frequency
ωres≃11.5J1 at which folded states first cross it in quasienergy: the time-averaged energy of the Floquet eigenstates, which orders the folded spectrum, shows that the doublet remains the isolated bottom of the spectrum down to
ω≃6J1, while stroboscopic time evolution over thousands of periods shows no heating for
ω≳ωres and only slow absorption below. The quasienergy resonances of the folded regime are invisible in the average energy, identifying them as parametrically weak avoided crossings. We argue that this mechanism, stability controlled by local energy scales rather than by the extensive many-body bandwidth, is of the type expected to survive in the thermodynamic limit, where a prethermal Floquet CSL should persist for
ω above a threshold set by local scales, with heating times exponentially long in
ω/J1, a conjecture that larger clusters can now test. Consistently, the optimal
D=3 chiral PEPS of the static problem still describes the driven doublet deep in the folded regime, with an essentially unchanged local tensor. Finally, we show that the drive is realizable on existing quantum simulators, via an explicit digital pulse sequence of XY-type two-spin gates on the four bond colours of the square lattice, with an infidelity of
1.5×10−5 per period.
We provide an analytic solution to the problem of system-bath dynamics under the effect of high-frequency driving that has applications in a large class of settings, such as driven-dissipative many-body systems. Our method relies on discrete symmetries of the system-bath Hamiltonian and provides the time evolution operator of the full system, including bath degrees of freedom, without weak-coupling or Markovian assumptions. An interpretation of the solution in terms of the stroboscopic evolution of a family of observables under the influence of an effective static Hamiltonian is proposed, which constitutes a flexible simulation procedure of nontrivial Hamiltonians. We instantiate the result with the study of the spin-boson model with time-dependent tunneling amplitude. We analyze the class of Hamiltonians that may be stroboscopically accessed for this example and illustrate the dynamics of system and bath degrees of freedom.
Floquet engineering of isolated systems is often based on the concept of the effective time-independent Floquet Hamiltonian, which describes the stroboscopic evolution of a periodically driven quantum system in steps of the driving period and which is routinely obtained analytically using high-frequency expansions. The generalization of these concepts to open quantum systems described by a Markovian master equation of Lindblad type turns out to be nontrivial: On the one hand, already for a two-level system two different phases can be distinguished, where the effective time-independent Floquet generator (describing the stroboscopic evolution) is either again Markovian and of Lindblad type or not. On the other hand, even though in the high-frequency regime a Lindbladian Floquet generator (Floquet Lindbladian) is numerically found to exist, this behavior is, curiously, not correctly reproduced within analytical high-frequency expansions. Here, we demonstrate that a proper Floquet Lindbladian can still be obtained from a high-frequency expansion, when treating the problem in a suitably chosen rotating frame. Within this approach, we can then also describe the transition to a phase at lower driving frequencies, where no Floquet Lindbladian exists, and show that the emerging non-Markovianity of the Floquet generator can entirely be attributed to the micromotion of the open driven system.
Floquet engineering in quantum simulation employs externally applied high-frequency pulses to dynamically design steady-state effective Hamiltonians. Such protocols can be used to enlarge the space of Hamiltonians but approximations often limit pulse profile shapes and therefore the space of available effective Hamiltonians. We consider a nonstroboscopic high-frequency expansion formalism for Floquet engineering. We generalize the pulse profiles available by rigorously keeping all necessary terms to lowest order in inverse frequency expansions used to derive the effective Hamiltonians. Our approach allows wide tunability in application of external driving fields. We apply our method to long-range interacting XXZ spin Hamiltonians. We model an example application where we derive conditions on specific pulse shapes to engineer effective Ising models from XXZ models. Our method allows the space of continuous pulse profiles, relevant to experimental control fields, to better and more accurately explore possible effective Hamiltonians available for Floquet engineering.
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 answer this question for generic systems with local interactions. We find that while noninteracting systems can either break or preserve Liouvillianity of the FM expansion, generic few-body and many-body interacting systems break it under any finite drive, which is essentially caused by propagation of interactions via higher-order terms of the FM expansion. Liouvillianity breaking implies that Markovian dissipative Floquet systems in the high-frequency regimes do not have static (Markovian) counterparts, giving a signature of emergent non-Markovianity. Our theory provides a useful insight in the quest for unique phenomena in dissipative Floquet systems.