We analyze the anisotropic Dicke model in the presence of a periodic drive and under a quasiperiodic drive. The study of drive-induced phenomena in this experimentally accessible model is important since, although it is simpler than full-fledged many-body quantum systems, it is still rich enough to exhibit many interesting features. We show that under a quasiperiodic Fibonacci (Thue-Morse) drive, the system features a prethermal plateau that increases as an exponential (stretched exponential) with the driving frequency before heating to an infinite-temperature state. In contrast, when the model is periodically driven, the dynamics reaches a plateau that is not followed by heating. In either case, the plateau value depends on the energy of the initial state and on the parameters of the undriven Hamiltonian. Surprisingly, this value does not always approach the infinite-temperature state monotonically as the frequency of the periodic drive decreases. We also show how the drive modifies the quantum critical point and discuss open questions associated with the analysis of level statistics at intermediate frequencies.
We analyze the anisotropic Dicke model in the presence of a periodic drive and under a quasiperiodic drive. The study of drive-induced phenomena in this experimentally accessible model is important since, although it is simpler than full-fledged many-body quantum systems, it is still rich enough to exhibit many interesting features. We show that under a quasiperiodic Fibonacci (Thue-Morse) drive, the system features a prethermal plateau that increases as an exponential (stretched exponential) with the driving frequency before heating to an infinite-temperature state. In contrast, when the model is periodically driven, the dynamics reaches a plateau that is not followed by heating. In either case, the plateau value depends on the energy of the initial state and on the parameters of the undriven Hamiltonian. Surprisingly, this value does not always approach the infinite-temperature state monotonically as the frequency of the periodic drive decreases. We also show how the drive modifies the quantum critical point and discuss open questions associated with the analysis of level statistics at intermediate frequencies.
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 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 with respect to random perturbations in the drive period. Considering exclusively nonintegrable Floquet Hamiltonians, we find that heating rates are nonuniversal: 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 the 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.
We investigate the electric-field driven power-law random banded matrix (PLRBM) model where a variation in the power-law exponent $\ensuremath{\alpha}$ yields a delocalization-to-localization phase transition. We examine the periodically driven PLRBM model with the help of the Floquet operator. The level spacing ratio and the generalized participation ratio of the Floquet Hamiltonian reveal a drive-induced weak multifractal (fractal) phase accompanied by diffusive (subdiffusive) transport on the delocalized side of the undriven PLRBM model. On the localized side, the time-periodic model remains localized---the average level-spacing ratio corresponds to Poisson statistics and logarithmic transport is observed in the dynamics. Extending our analysis to the aperiodic Thue-Morse driven system, we find that the aperiodically driven clean long-range hopping model (clean counterpart of the PLRBM model) exhibits the phenomenon of exact dynamical localization on tuning the drive parameters at special points. The disordered time-aperiodic system shows diffusive transport followed by relaxation to the infinite-temperature state on the delocalized side, and a prethermal plateau with subdiffusion on the localized side. Additionally, we compare this with a quasiperiodically driven Aubry-Andr\'e-Harper model that also undergoes a localization-delocalization transition. Unlike the disordered long-range model, it features a prolonged prethermal plateau followed by subdiffusion to the infinite temperature state, even on the delocalized side.
We investigate the role of a quasiperiodically driven electric field in a disordered fermionic chain. In the clean noninteracting case, we show the emergence of dynamical localization---a phenomenon previously known to exist only for a perfect periodic drive. In contrast, in the presence of disorder, where a high-frequency periodic drive preserves Anderson localization, we show that the quasiperiodic drive destroys it and leads to slow relaxation. Considering the role of interactions, we uncover the phenomenon of quasiperiodic driving-induced logarithmic relaxation, where a suitably tuned drive (corresponding to dynamical localization in the clean, noninteracting limit) slows down the dynamics even when the disorder is small enough for the system to be in the ergodic phase. This is in sharp contrast to the fast relaxation seen in the undriven model, as well as the absence of thermalization (drive-induced many-body localization) exhibited by a high-frequency periodic drive.
The nonequilibrium quantum dynamics of closed many-body systems is a rich yet challenging field. While recent progress for periodically driven (Floquet) systems has yielded a number of rigorous results, our understanding on quantum many-body systems driven by rapidly varying but aperiodic and quasiperiodic driving is still limited. Here, we derive rigorous, nonperturbative, bounds on the heating rate in quantum many-body systems under Thue-Morse quasiperiodic driving and under random multipolar driving, the latter being a tunably randomized variant of the former. In the process, we derive a static effective Hamiltonian that describes the transient prethermal state, including the dynamics of local observables. Our bound for Thue-Morse quasiperiodic driving suggests that the heating time scales like (ω/g)^{-C ln(ω/g)} with a positive constant C and a typical energy scale g of the Hamiltonian, in agreement with our numerical simulations.
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.