We discuss the universal nature of relaxation in isolated many-body quantum systems subjected to global and strong periodic driving. Our rigorous Floquet analysis shows that the energy of the system remains almost constant up to an exponentially long time in frequency for arbitrary initial states and that an effective Hamiltonian obtained by a truncation of the Floquet-Magnus expansion is a quasiconserved quantity in a long time scale. These two general properties lead to an intriguing classification on the initial stage of relaxation, one of which is similar to the prethermalization phenomenon in nearly integrable systems.
We discuss the universal nature of relaxation in isolated many-body quantum systems subjected to global and strong periodic driving. Our rigorous Floquet analysis shows that the energy of the system remains almost constant up to an exponentially long time in frequency for arbitrary initial states and that an effective Hamiltonian obtained by a truncation of the Floquet-Magnus expansion is a quasiconserved quantity in a long time scale. These two general properties lead to an intriguing classification on the initial stage of relaxation, one of which is similar to the prethermalization phenomenon in nearly integrable systems.
We establish some general dynamical properties of quantum many-body systems that are subject to a high-frequency periodic driving. We prove that such systems have a quasiconserved 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 ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{*}$, which is exponentially large 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 $t\ensuremath{\lesssim}{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{*}$, eventually heating up to an infinite-temperature state after times $t\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{*}$. 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.
It is proved that the energy absorption in a periodically driven classical spin system is exponentially slow in frequency, which results in a two-step relaxation called the Floquet prethermalization. This result is shown by establishing the classical limit of the quantum spin dynamics. The Floquet prethermal state is well described by the Gibbs ensemble with respect to the static effective Hamiltonian obtained by a truncation of the Floquet-Magnus expansion. On the other hand, the same effective Hamiltonian does not reproduce the local dynamics for an exponentially long time. This is due to the chaoticity of classical dynamics and in stark contrast to quantum spin systems, in which the effective Hamiltonian well reproduces the exact quantum dynamics up to an exponentially long time.
Prethermalization, by introducing emergent quasiconserved observables, plays a crucial role in protecting periodically driven (Floquet) many-body phases over an exponentially long time, while the ultimate fate of such quasiconserved operators can signal thermalization to infinite temperature. To elucidate the properties of prethermal quasiconservation in many-body Floquet systems, here we systematically analyze infinite-temperature correlations between observables. We numerically show that the late-time behavior of the autocorrelations unambiguously distinguishes quasiconserved observables from nonconserved ones, allowing one to single out a set of linearly independent quasiconserved observables. By investigating two Floquet spin models, we identify two different mechanisms underlying the quasiconservation law. First, we numerically verify energy quasiconservation when the driving frequency is large, so that the system dynamics is approximately described by a static prethermal Hamiltonian. More interestingly, under moderate driving frequency, another quasiconserved observable can still persist if the Floquet driving contains a large global rotation. We show theoretically how to calculate this conserved observable and provide numerical verification. Having systematically identified all quasiconserved observables, we can finally investigate their behavior in the infinite-time limit and thermodynamic limit, using autocorrelations obtained from both numerical simulation and experiments in solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance systems.
We study the emergence and stability of a prethermal phase in an integrable many-body system subjected to a Fibonacci drive. Despite not being periodic, Fibonacci drives have been shown to introduce dynamical constraints due to their self-similar structure, unlike random driving protocols. From perturbative analysis, this has been argued to result in an exponentially long prethermal phase in the high frequency limit of driving. Examining higher order terms in the perturbative expansion, we show that the perturbative description breaks down eventually in such systems at a finite universal order, which depends solely on features of the Fibonacci sequence. This leads to an onset of energy absorption at long time scales for intermediate and low driving frequencies. Interestingly, in spite of the breakdown of an effective Hamiltonian in the perturbative analysis, we still observe slow logarithmic heating time-scales, unlike purely random drives.
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 nonintegrable 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 reveal that, in the limit of infinite system size and driving period, the steady state after a long time is equivalent to the infinite-temperature state. We obtain the asymptotic behavior L^{-1} and T^{-2} as to how the steady state approaches the infinite-temperature state as the system size L and the driving period T increase.
Prethermalization refers to the transient phenomenon where a system thermalizes according to a Hamiltonian that is not the generator of its evolution. We provide here a rigorous framework for quantum spin systems where prethermalization is exhibited for very long times. First, we consider quantum spin systems under periodic driving at high frequency ν. We prove that up to a quasi-exponential time τ∗∼ecνlog3ν, the system barely absorbs energy. Instead, there is an effective local Hamiltonian Dˆ that governs the time evolution up to τ∗, and hence this effective Hamiltonian is a conserved quantity up to τ∗. Next, we consider systems without driving, but with a separation of energy scales in the Hamiltonian. A prime example is the Fermi–Hubbard model where the interaction U is much larger than the hopping J. Also here we prove the emergence of an effective conserved quantity, different from the Hamiltonian, up to a time τ∗ that is (almost) exponential in U/J.