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arXiv:1905.01317 · Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics

Topology and Broken Symmetry in Floquet Systems

Fenner Harper, Rahul Roy, Mark Spencer Rudner, Shivaji L. Sondhi

Published Dec 3, 2019• 234 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Floquet systems are governed by periodic, time-dependent Hamiltonians. Prima facie they should absorb energy from the external drives involved in modulating their couplings and heat up to infinite temperature. However, this unhappy state of affairs can be avoided in many ways. Instead, as has become clear from much recent work, Floquet systems can exhibit a variety of nontrivial behavior—some of which is impossible in undriven systems. In this review, we describe the main ideas and themes of this work: novel Floquet drives that exhibit nontrivial topology in single-particle systems, the existence and classification of exotic Floquet drives in interacting systems, and the attendant notion of many-body Floquet phases and arguments for their stability to heating.

DOI
10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031218-013721

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Floquet systems are governed by periodic, time-dependent Hamiltonians. Prima facie they should absorb energy from the external drives involved in modulating their couplings and heat up to infinite temperature. However, this unhappy state of affairs can be avoided in many ways. Instead, as has become clear from much recent work, Floquet systems can exhibit a variety of nontrivial behavior—some of which is impossible in undriven systems. In this review, we describe the main ideas and themes of this work: novel Floquet drives that exhibit nontrivial topology in single-particle systems, the existence and classification of exotic Floquet drives in interacting systems, and the attendant notion of many-body Floquet phases and arguments for their stability to heating.
We review methods for using time-periodic fields (e.g., laser or microwave fields) to induce non-equilibrium topological phenomena in quantum many-body systems. We discuss how such fields can be used to change the topological properties of the single particle spectrum, and key experimental demonstrations in solid state, cold atomic, and photonic systems. The single particle Floquet band structure provides a stage on which the system's dynamics play out; the crucial question is then how to obtain robust topological behaviour in the many-particle setting. In the regime of mesoscopic transport, we discuss manifestations of topological edge states induced in the Floquet spectrum. Outside the context of mesoscopic transport, the main challenge of inducing stable topological phases in many-body Floquet systems is their tendency to absorb energy from the drive and thereby to heat up. We discuss three routes to overcoming this challenge: long-lived transient dynamics and prethermalization, disorder-induced many-body localization, and engineered couplings to external baths. We discuss the types of phenomena that can be explored in each of these regimes, and their experimental realizations.
Hamiltonians which are inaccessible in static systems can be engineered in periodically driven many-body systems, i.e., Floquet many-body systems. We propose to use interacting particles in a one-dimensional (1D) harmonic potential with periodic kicking to investigate two-dimensional topological and many-body physics. Depending on the driving parameters, the Floquet Hamiltonian of single kicked harmonic oscillator has various lattice structures in phase space. The noncommutative geometry of phase space gives rise to the topology of the system. We investigate the effective interactions of particles in phase space and find that the point-like contact interaction in quasi-1D real space becomes a long-rang Coulomb-like interaction in phase space, while the hardcore interaction in pure-1D real space becomes a confinement quark-like potential in phase space. We also find that the Floquet exchange interaction does not disappear even in the classical limit, and can be viewed as an effective long-range spin–spin interaction induced by collision. Our proposal may provide platforms to explore new physics and exotic phases by Floquet many-body engineering.
Clean and interacting periodically driven systems are believed to exhibit a single, trivial "infinite-temperature" Floquet-ergodic phase. In contrast, here we show that their disordered Floquet many-body localized counterparts can exhibit distinct ordered phases delineated by sharp transitions. Some of these are analogs of equilibrium states with broken symmetries and topological order, while others-genuinely new to the Floquet problem-are characterized by order and nontrivial periodic dynamics. We illustrate these ideas in driven spin chains with Ising symmetry.
Hamiltonians which are inaccessible in static systems can be engineered in periodically driven many-body systems, i.e., Floquet many-body systems. We propose to use interacting particles in a one-dimensional (1D) harmonic potential with periodic kicking to investigate two-dimensional topological and many-body physics. Depending on the driving parameters, the Floquet Hamiltonian of single kicked harmonic oscillator has various lattice structures in phase space. The noncommutative geometry of phase space gives rise to the topology of the system. We investigate the effective interactions of particles in phase space and find that the point-like contact interaction in quasi-1D real space becomes a long-rang Coulomb-like interaction in phase space, while the hardcore interaction in pure-1D real space becomes a confinement quark-like potential in phase space. We also find that the Floquet exchange interaction does not disappear even in the classical limit, and can be viewed as an effective long-range spin–spin interaction induced by collision. Our proposal may provide platforms to explore new physics and exotic phases by Floquet many-body engineering .
Controlling and manipulating complex many-body quantum systems will be a key ingredient \nfor the development of next-generation technologies. While the realisation of a \nuniversal quantum machine is still out of reach, in recent years experimental systems of \nultracold atoms have already evolved into a vivid field of research for quantum simulation. \nCrucially, such systems even allow for the successful quantum engineering of targeted \nmany-body systems by means of coherent periodic driving. The essential properties of \nthese Floquet systems encompass two main aspects: fast driving facilitates the simulation \nof effective static systems, and interactions lead to unique heating effects as energy is only \nconserved modulo the driving frequency. Within this thesis we theoretically study both \nof these aspects in respective model systems. \nIn part I of this thesis, we investigate the dynamics of excitations of a bosonic Mott \ninsulator in a designed one-dimensional Floquet system. Here, periodic driving in combination \nwith breaking all mirror symmetries of the system can induce directed motion of \nparticles. In the limit of small excitation densities, the effectively non-interacting quantum \nratchet determines the motion of holes and doublons in the Mott insulator and can in fact \nbe used to manipulate the dynamics of such. This little quantum machine can also be \nused to drive particles against an external force, where transport is possible but requires \nthe fulfilment of a commensurability condition for long times. \nIn part II, we discuss the role of interactions for periodically driven systems by means \nof a Floquet version of the Boltzmann equation. Starting from the Keldysh approach, \nwe develop this semiclassical formalism based on a clear separation of time scales. The \nresult is a description of the dynamics and the scattering of Floquet quasiparticles in \nsuch systems. Here, the property of discrete energy violation is naturally encoded in our \nformalism predicting the heating of interacting Floquet systems to infinite temperatures in \nthe long-time limit. As a first application of this approach, we investigate a cold atom setup \nrealising the Haldane model by means of periodic shaking. While homogeneous systems \nheat up globally, a confining potential evokes thermoelectric transport effects resulting \nfrom spatially dependent heating characteristics. Moreover, we show that the interplay \nof intrinsic heating, macroscopic diffusion and non-trivial topological properties of the \nHaldane model lead to an anomalous Floquet-Nernst effect, which describes anomalous \nparticle transport as the result of developing temperature gradients. \nIn part III, we elaborate on the quantum simulator aspect of ultracold atoms by providing \na theoretical framework for a possible simulation of a topological edge state in a \none-dimensional optical lattice. In this case, the one-dimensional Dirac equation with \nspatially varying mass is important, which captures the topological properties of a corresponding \nsystem of the BDI symmetry class. We analytically discuss such system and \ninvestigate the role of mean-field interaction effects. We also identify the emergence of \ndynamical instabilities in a realisation with bosonic atoms.
Floquet engineering offers exhilarating opportunities for controlling the dynamics of quantum many body systems and realizing new nonequilibrium phases of matter. However, generic interacting Floquet systems tend to heat up due to energy absorption from the drive, washing away the desired behavior. In this work, the authors characterize the steady states of an interacting electronic system, coupled to a phonon heat bath. They determine the regimes where the system-bath coupling stabilizes Floquet-insulator-like states, an important prerequisite for realizing topological states through Floquet engineering.