We study a chain of periodically driven Rydberg atoms and identify a class of drive protocols for which the system exhibits emergent prethermal Bethe integrability at special drive frequencies. We provide a perturbative analytic expression of its Floquet Hamiltonian in the large drive amplitude regime. We demonstrate integrability of the leading term of this Floquet Hamiltonian at special drive frequencies, which we identify, by mapping it to the Hamiltonian of the paradigmatic spin-
1/2 XXZ chain. We support our analytical results by exact diagonalization studies on finite chains. Our numerical results on level statistics, half-chain entanglement entropy, and longitudinal magnetization of the driven chain brings out its emergent integrable nature at the special drive frequencies which persists up to a large prethermal timescale.
We compute the Floquet Hamiltonian
HF for weakly interacting fermions subjected to a continuous periodic drive using a Floquet perturbation theory (FPT) with the interaction amplitude being the perturbation parameter. This allows us to address the dynamics of the system at intermediate drive frequencies $\ensuremath{\hbar}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}\ensuremath{\ge}{V}_{0}\ensuremath{\ll}{\mathcal{J}}_{0}$, where
J0 is the amplitude of the kinetic term, ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$ is the drive frequency, and
V0 is the typical interaction strength between the fermions. We compute, for random initial states, the fidelity
F between wave functions after a drive cycle obtained using
HF and that obtained using exact diagonalization (ED). We find that FPT yields a substantially larger value of
F compared to its Magnus counterpart for ${V}_{0}\ensuremath{\le}\ensuremath{\hbar}{\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$ and ${V}_{0}\ensuremath{\ll}{\mathcal{J}}_{0}$. We use the
HF obtained to study the nature of the steady state of an weakly interacting fermion chain; we find a wide range of ${\ensuremath{\omega}}_{D}$ which leads to subthermal or superthermal steady states for finite chains. The driven fermionic chain displays perfect dynamical localization for
V0=0; we address the fate of this dynamical localization in the steady state of a finite interacting chain and show that there is a crossover between localized and delocalized steady states. We discuss the implication of our results for thermodynamically large chains and chart out experiments which can test our theory.
The critical properties characterizing the formation of the Floquet time crystal in the prethermal phase are investigated analytically in the periodically driven
O(N) model. In particular, we focus on the critical line separating the trivial phase with period synchronized dynamics and the absence of long-range spatial order from the nontrivial phase where long-range spatial order is accompanied by period-doubling dynamics. In the vicinity of the critical line, with a combination of dimensional expansion and exact solution for $N\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\ensuremath{\infty}$, we determine the exponent $\ensuremath{\nu}$ that characterizes the divergence of the spatial correlation length of the equal-time correlation functions, the exponent $\ensuremath{\beta}$ characterizing the growth of the amplitude of the order parameter, as well as the initial-slip exponent $\ensuremath{\theta}$ of the aging dynamics when a quench is performed from deep in the trivial phase to the critical line. The exponents $\ensuremath{\nu},\ensuremath{\beta},\ensuremath{\theta}$ are found to be identical to those in the absence of the drive. In addition, the functional form of the aging is found to depend on whether the system is probed at times that are small or large compared to the drive period. The spatial structure of the two-point correlation functions, obtained as a linear response to a perturbing potential in the vicinity of the critical line, is found to show algebraic decays that are longer ranged than in the absence of a drive, and besides being period doubled are also found to oscillate in space at the wave vector $\ensuremath{\omega}/(2v), v$ being the velocity of the quasiparticles, and $\ensuremath{\omega}$ being the drive frequency.
We investigate a class of periodically driven many-body systems that allows us to extend the phenomenon of prethermalization to the vicinity of isolated intermediate-to-low drive frequencies away from the high-frequency limit. We provide numerical evidence for the formation of a parametrically long-lived prethermal plateau, captured by an effective Floquet Hamiltonian computed using the replica inverse-frequency expansion, and demonstrate its stability w.r.t.~random perturbations in the drive period. Considering exclusively nonintegrable Floquet Hamiltonians, we find that heating rates are non-universal: we observe Fermi's Golden Rule scaling, power-law scaling inconsistent with the Golden Rule, and non-power law scaling, depending on the drive. Despite the asymptotic character of the inverse-frequency expansion, we show that it describes the thermostatic properties of the state all along the evolution up to infinite temperature, with higher-order terms improving the accuracy. Our results suggest a dynamical mechanism to gradually increase temperature in isolated quantum simulators, such as ultracold atoms, and open up an alternative possibility to investigate thermal phase transitions and the interplay between thermal and quantum criticality using Floquet drives.
Abstract We demonstrate the existence of exact Floquet flat bands in a class of non-integrable quantum many-body Hamiltonians leading to strong violation of the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis in the presence of a two-tone drive characterized by frequencies Ω1 and Ω 2 = ν Ω 1 , where ν is an integer. We provide the exact analytic condition for this phenomenon to occur for a generic protocol. A small departure from the flat band conditions leads to suppression of heating over a long prethermal timescale in an otherwise ergodic many-body system away from integrable or perturbative regimes; we elucidate the central role of the flat band behind such heating suppression. Our analysis indicates the existence of a perturbative Floquet Hamiltonian, away from high drive frequency/amplitude limit, which controls the dynamics of the driven system near such flat bands. We demonstrate this phenomenon by exact numerical studies of Floquet bandwidth, spectral form factor, entanglement and Shannon entropies, heat absorption, and correlation functions of a driven Rydberg chain. We also study the corresponding micromotion which exhibits coherent reversal of excitations reminiscent of echoes; in addition, it harbors an exact reflection symmetry about t = T 1 / 2 , where T 1 = 2 π / Ω 1 , which we elucidate. We discuss experiments which can test our theory.
We demonstrate that the prethermal regime of periodically driven (Floquet), classical many-body systems can host nonequilibrium phases of matter. In particular, we show that there exists an effective Hamiltonian that captures the dynamics of ensembles of classical trajectories despite the breakdown of this description at the single trajectory level. In addition, we prove that the effective Hamiltonian can host emergent symmetries protected by the discrete time-translation symmetry of the drive. The spontaneous breaking of such an emergent symmetry leads to a subharmonic response, characteristic of time crystalline order, that survives to exponentially late times in the frequency of the drive. To this end, we numerically demonstrate the existence of classical prethermal time crystals in systems with different dimensionalities and ranges of interaction. Extensions to higher order and fractional time crystals are also discussed.