We present an extension of the functional renormalization group to Floquet space, which enables us to treat the long time behavior of interacting time periodically driven quantum dots. It is one of its strength that the method is neither bound to small driving amplitudes nor to small driving frequencies, i.e., very general time periodic signals can be considered. It is applied to the interacting resonant level model, a prototype model of a spinless, fermionic quantum dot. The renormalization in several setups with different combinations of time periodic parameters is studied, where the numerical results are complemented by analytic expressions for the renormalization in the limit of small driving amplitude. We show how the driving frequency acts as an infrared cutoff of the underlying renormalization group flow which manifests in novel power laws. We utilize the tunability of the effective reservoir distribution function in a periodically driven onsite energy setup to show how its shape is directly reflected in the renormalization group flow. This allows us to flexibly tune the power-law renormalization generically encountered in quantum dot structures. Finally, an in-phase quantum pump as well as a single parameter pump are investigated in the whole regime of driving frequency, demonstrating that the new power law in the driving frequency is reflected in the mean current of the latter.
We present an extension of the functional renormalization group to Floquet space, which enables us to treat the long time behavior of interacting time periodically driven quantum dots. It is one of its strength that the method is neither bound to small driving amplitudes nor to small driving frequencies, i.e., very general time periodic signals can be considered. It is applied to the interacting resonant level model, a prototype model of a spinless, fermionic quantum dot. The renormalization in several setups with different combinations of time periodic parameters is studied, where the numerical results are complemented by analytic expressions for the renormalization in the limit of small driving amplitude. We show how the driving frequency acts as an infrared cutoff of the underlying renormalization group flow which manifests in novel power laws. We utilize the tunability of the effective reservoir distribution function in a periodically driven onsite energy setup to show how its shape is directly reflected in the renormalization group flow. This allows us to flexibly tune the power-law renormalization generically encountered in quantum dot structures. Finally, an in-phase quantum pump as well as a single parameter pump are investigated in the whole regime of driving frequency, demonstrating that the new power law in the driving frequency is reflected in the mean current of the latter.
The main goal of the present thesis is to set up a functional renormalization group formalism in Floquet space to treat interacting, time periodic quantum dots and to investigate the consequential renormalization of the parameters and the transport through the dot. Building upon the time independent, steady state description in frequency space (Karrasch 2010, Jakobs 2009) and a time dependent FRG formulation (Kennes 2014), we tackle the steady state of periodically driven quantum dots. We focus on the long time behavior where all transients have died out, and therefore the entire system is characterized by the same periodicity as given by the driven external fields. As a consequence, we can transform the according time dependent flow equation to Floquet space using Floquet-Green’s functions. It allows us to study quantum dot systems in the whole range of driving frequency and amplitude in the presence of a small Coulomb interaction. We exemplify the potential of our approach by applying it to the interacting resonant level model (IRLM), describing an idealized single level quantum dot dominated only by charge fluctuations.We investigate the role of the driving frequency Ω in the RG flows of the time periodic parameters of the IRLM. The small driving amplitude limit allows to complement our numerical solution by analytic expressions of the renormalization of all dot parameters to the leading order of driving amplitude over mean value. Four different configurations are studied, where distinct combinations of the hopping and/or onsite energy of the dot are chosen to be time periodic. The transparent structure of the renormalization of the parameters in this limit, allows for an analytic treatment of all higher harmonics, where the various protocols reveal very different RG flows. Even beyond the small driving amplitude limit the RG flow is discussed with the help of an effective reservoir distribution function which can be defined in this setup and its form is defined by the ratio of driving amplitude and frequency (Suzuki 2015). The second focus is directed to the transport in the time periodic quantum dot systems and how it is affected by the Coulomb interaction. Based on the well studied parameter pump in the adiabatic limit (Brouwer 1998), where two parameters are varied periodically and phase shifted, we like to investigate the pumped charge in the whole regime of driving frequency and amplitude including interaction in such a setup. Further a single parameter pump is realized and the charge susceptibility as well as the mean current are studied. The latter reveals power law behavior on the driving frequency. A quantum master equation calculation in Floquet-Liouville space complements the FRG results to study the requirements of such a single parameter quantum pump. Finally, the conductance and the current are considered for several time periodic hoppings of non-sinusoidal form.
We introduce a functional renormalization group framework formulated directly in the Floquet steady state that systematically incorporates frequency-dependent interaction effects. By retaining the frequency structure of the two-particle vertex up to second order in interaction strength, our approach provides controlled access to dynamical response functions and nonequilibrium transport in driven, interacting systems. Using the periodically driven single-impurity Anderson model as a paradigmatic example, we benchmark our results against state-of-the-art Floquet Green's function methods and find quantitative agreement for finite-frequency observables up to intermediate interaction strengths. Remarkably, we also show that static properties are often captured reliably by much simpler approximations, suggesting practical pathways for modeling driven quantum materials. Finally, we demonstrate that although periodic driving of the dot strongly broadens the Kondo resonance through inelastic scattering, it leaves the many-body Kondo cloud largely intact. This robustness suppresses Floquet replicas of the Kondo peak and leads to a partial persistence of Kondo pinning, highlighting the resilience of emergent many-body correlations under local periodic driving.
Driving a quantum system periodically in time can profoundly alter its long-time correlations and give rise to exotic quantum states of matter. The complexity of the combination of many-body correlations and dynamic manipulations has the potential to uncover a whole field of new phenomena, but the theoretical and numerical understanding becomes extremely difficult. We now propose a promising numerical method by generalizing the density matrix renormalization group to a superposition of Fourier components of periodically driven many-body systems using Floquet theory. With this method we can study the full time-dependent quantum solution in a large parameter range for all evolution times, beyond the commonly used high-frequency approximations. Numerical results are presented for the isotropic Heisenberg antiferromagnetic spin-1/2 chain under both local(edge) and global driving for spin-spin correlations and temporal fluctuations. As the frequency is lowered, we demonstrate that more and more Fourier components become relevant and determine strong length- and frequency-dependent changes of the quantum correlations that cannot be described by effective static models.
We investigate a long-time asymptotic state of periodically driven open quantum systems analytically. The model we consider in this paper is a free fermionic system coupled to an energy and particle reservoir. We clarify some generic properties of the system which are independent of the details of the reservoir in the high-frequency regime of the external driving. When the frequency of the external driving is much larger than the energy cutoff of the system-reservoir coupling, the low-energy properties of the system are equivalent to those of the Gibbs distribution of a Floquet effective Hamiltonian. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of finite dissipation on the system, and elucidate that we cannot suppress excitations by merely increasing the system-reservoir coupling because the excitations are created through the reservoir by the external driving when the frequency is smaller than the energy cutoff of the system-reservoir coupling.
Periodically-driven (Floquet) quantum systems are ubiquitous in science and technology. For example, when a laser illuminates a material or an AC voltage is applied to a device, the system is well-described by a time-periodic Hamiltonian. In recent years, periodic driving has been proposed, not just as a tool to excite and probe devices, but actually as a mechanism of engineering new phases of matter, some of which have no equilibrium analog. However, with this promise comes a serious problem. Intuitively, if energy is injected into and distributed throughout a system, it is no surprise that it tends to heat up indefinitely to infinite temperature. In this thesis, we study the mechanisms of heating, i.e. the process of thermalization, in Floquet systems and propose methods to control them. Specifically, for non-interacting Floquet systems that are coupled to external bosonic and fermionic baths (e.g. laser-driven electrons in a semiconductor that interact with phonons and an external lead), we classify the relevant scattering processes that contribute to cooling/heating in the Floquet bands and suggest methods to suppress heating via bandwidth-restrictions on the baths. We find that is possible, with appropriate dissipative engineering, to stabilize a controlled incompressible nonequilibrium steady-state resembling a ground state - a state we term the "Floquet insulator." We extend this analysis to include short-range interactions that contribute additional heating processes and show, under the same framework, that heating can be controlled with dissipation. In the process, we develop a simple effective model for the Floquet band densities that captures the essence of all the Floquet scattering processes and that is useful for ballparking experimentally-relevant estimates of heating. Next, we turn our attention to strongly-interacting closed Floquet systems and study how heating emerges through a proliferation of resonances. We find a novel integrable point governing the strong-interaction limit of the Floquet system and examine the breakdown of integrability via the proliferation of resonances. We observe two distinct scaling regimes, attributed to non-thermal and thermal behavior, and discover a power-law scaling of the crossover between them as a function of system size. The lingering ergodicity-breaking effects of the conserved quantities in the vicinity (in parameter space) of the integrable point at finite size is a phenomena we term "near-integrability." These results suggest that small quantum systems, which are accessible currently in many platforms (e.g. trapped ions, cold atoms, superconducting devices), intrinsically host non-thermal states that one may be able to utilize to avoid heating. Furthermore, our results suggest a "dual" interpretation, in the thermodynamic limit, that a periodically-driven system exhibits prethermalization as a power-law in interaction strength.
Time-periodic quantum systems are present all over science and technology. They have been successfully studied using Floquet theory, and a broad diversity of interesting phenomena such as coherent destruction of tunnelling, dynamical localization and creation of new phases of matter have been discovered. Furthermore, periodic driving has also been introduced as a tool for engineering novel quantum systems that have no static analogue. Besides these remarkable achievements for isolated systems, in reality, systems always interact with their surroundings. Taking the effect of the environment into account, time-periodic quantum systems have been mainly described using the Floquet-Markov approach, which consists in deriving a weak coupling master equation in the Floquet basis. In this thesis, we focus on how to overcome these standard approximations in the description of driven open quantum systems. We start by providing a general review on the topics of isolated driven systems, open quantum systems and the Floquet-Markov approach, before presenting the main results of this work. Under the effect of high-frequency driving, we provide an analytic solution to a large class of open quantum systems. Our method relies on discrete symmetries of the system-bath Hamiltonian and grants access to the time evolution operator of the full system, including bath degrees of freedom. The solution can be interpreted as the stroboscopic evolution of a family of observables under the influence of an effective static Hamiltonian. This provides a flexible simulation procedure of nontrivial Hamiltonians. The results are exemplified with the driven spin-boson model, where a coherent control of dissipation is observed. By a novel combination of Floquet theory, full counting statistics and a Markovian embedding strategy (reaction coordinate mapping), more intricate scenarios with additional driven system-environment interactions are addressed. Hereby, we can access the dynamics and thermodynamics of a periodically driven thermal machine. For the particular case where the working medium is a two-level system, we identify four different operating regimes, including a heat engine and a refrigerator. As the coupling strength is increased, their efficiency and coefficient of performance decrease and the refrigerator regime disappears. Notably, our model reproduces the setup of laser cooling of trapped ions in a specific parameter limit. Following the same combination of methods, we investigate electron pumping through a single quantum dot with periodically modulated energy and tunnelling amplitudes. In the high-frequency regime, the direction of the current can be controlled with the driving phase and a rectification effect that is exclusive to the non-Markovian character of the model is observed. In the low-frequency regime, we apply an additional transformation to view the model as three independent transport channels and observe that the coupling strength also controls the current direction. Studying charge fluctuations we validate that our model behaves as a single-electron source.