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arXiv:1905.00031 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Characterizations of prethermal states in periodically driven many-body systems with unbounded chaotic diffusion

Atanu Rajak, Itzhack Dana, Emanuele G. Dalla Torre

Published Sep 19, 2019• 39 citations
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Abstract

We introduce well-defined characterizations of prethermal states in realistic periodically driven many-body systems with unbounded chaotic diffusion of the kinetic energy. These systems, interacting arrays of periodically kicked rotors, are paradigmatic models of many-body chaos theory. We show that the prethermal states in these systems are well described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble based essentially on the average Hamiltonian. The latter is the quasiconserved quantity in the prethermal state and the ensemble is characterized by the temperature of the state. An explicit exact expression for this temperature is derived. Using also arguments based on chaos theory, we demonstrate that the lifetime of the prethermal state is exponentially long in the inverse of the temperature, in units of the driving frequency squared. Our analytical results, in particular those for the temperature and the lifetime of the prethermal state, agree well with numerical observations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.100.100302

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We introduce well-defined characterizations of prethermal states in realistic periodically driven many-body systems with unbounded chaotic diffusion of the kinetic energy. These systems, interacting arrays of periodically kicked rotors, are paradigmatic models of many-body chaos theory. We show that the prethermal states in these systems are well described by a generalized Gibbs ensemble based essentially on the average Hamiltonian. The latter is the quasiconserved quantity in the prethermal state and the ensemble is characterized by the temperature of the state. An explicit exact expression for this temperature is derived. Using also arguments based on chaos theory, we demonstrate that the lifetime of the prethermal state is exponentially long in the inverse of the temperature, in units of the driving frequency squared. Our analytical results, in particular those for the temperature and the lifetime of the prethermal state, agree well with numerical observations.
Periodically driven (Floquet) systems are said to prethermalize when their energy absorption is very slow for a long time. This effect was first discovered in quantum spin models, where the heating rate is exponentially small in the ratio between the driving frequency and the spin bandwidth. Recently, it was shown that prethermalization occurs also in classical systems with an infinite bandwidth. Here, we address the open question of which small parameter controls the lifetime of the prethermal state in these systems. We show that the lifetime is controlled by the temperature of the prethermal state, which is quasiconserved when the heating is slow. We substantiate this finding in systems of periodically driven coupled rotors, by studying the dependence of the prethermal lifetime on both the initial conditions and the connectivity. This result allows us to develop a simple analytical model that describes the crossover from prethermalization to chaos in many-body classical systems.
A many-body interacting system of classical kicked rotor serves as a prototypical model for studying Floquet heating dynamics. Having established the fact that this system exhibits a long-lived prethermal phase with a quasiconserved average Hamiltonian before entering into the chaotic heating regime, we use spatiotemporal fluctuation correlation of kinetic energy as a two-point observable to probe the above dynamic phases. We remarkably find the diffusive transport of fluctuation in the prethermal regime suggesting an underlying hydrodynamic picture in a generalized Gibbs ensemble with a definite temperature that depends on the driving parameter and the initial conditions. On the other hand, the heating regime is characterized by a diffusive growth of kinetic energy where the correlation is sharply localized around the fluctuation center for all time. Consequently, we attribute nondiffusive and nonlocalized structure of correlation to the crossover regime, connecting the prethermal phase to the heating phase, where the kinetic energy displays a complicated growth structure. We understand these numerical findings using the notion of relative phase matching where the prethermal phase (heating regime) refers to an effectively coupled (isolated) nature of the rotors. We exploit the statistical uncorrelated nature of the angles of the rotors in the heating regime to find the analytical form of the correlator that mimics our numerical results in a convincing way.
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∗{H}_{*}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∗{H}_{*}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∗{H}_{*}H∗​ is ergodic, the driven system prethermalizes to a thermal state described by H∗{H}_{*}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.
We explore the phenomena of prethermalization in a many-body classical system of rotors under aperiodic drives characterised by waiting time distribution (WTD), where the waiting time is defined as the time between two consecutive kicks. We consider here two types of aperiodic drives: random and quasi-periodic. We observe a short-lived pseudo-thermal regime with algebraic suppression of heating for the random drive where WTD has an infinite tail, as observed for Poisson and binomial kick sequences. On the other hand, quasi-periodic drive characterised by a WTD with a sharp cut-off, observed for Thue-Morse sequence of kick, leads to prethermal region where heating is exponentially suppressed. The kinetic energy growth is analyzed using an average surprise associated with WTD quantifying the randomness of drive. In all of the aperiodic drives we obtain the chaotic heating regime for late time, however, the diffusion constant gets renormalized by the average surprise of WTD in comparison to the periodic case.
Driven many-body systems typically experience heating due to the lack of energy conservation. Heating may be suppressed for time-periodic drives, but little is known for less regular drive protocols. In this paper, we investigate the heating dynamics in aperiodically kicked systems, specifically those driven by quasiperiodic Thue-Morse or a family of sequences with n -multipolar temporal correlations. We demonstrate that multiple heating channels can be eliminated . The number of eliminated channels increases with multipolar order n . We illustrate this in a classical kicked rotor chain where we find a long-lived prethermal regime. When the static Hamiltonian only involves the kinetic energy, the prethermal lifetime t* can strongly depend on the temporal correlations of the drive, with a power-law dependence on the t*∼K−2n , for which we can account using a simple linearization argument. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
We investigate the periodically driven dynamics of many-body systems, either classical or quantum, finite-dimensional or mean-field, displaying an unbounded phase-space. Using the lattice ϕ4ϕ^4ϕ4 model and the ppp-spin spherical model as representative examples, we find that the inclusion of a smooth periodic drive atop an otherwise ergodic dynamics leads to a long-lived prethermalization, even at moderate driving frequencies. In specific asymptotic limits, we compute the corresponding prethermal Hamiltonian from an analytical perturbation scheme.