We demonstrate that periodically driven Fermions coupled to simple bosonic baths have steady state occupations of Floquet Bloch bands that generically display nonanalyticities at certain momenta that resemble the Fermi surfaces of equilibrium non-Fermi liquids. Remarkably these nonequilibrium Fermi surfaces remain sharp even when the bath is at finite temperature, leading to critical power-law decaying correlations at finite temperature, a phenomenon with no analog in equilibrium. We also show that generically there is in-gap current rectification for clean metals lacking inversion symmetry, and explain why this occurs universally regardless of the details of collisions.
We demonstrate that periodically driven Fermions coupled to simple bosonic baths have steady state occupations of Floquet Bloch bands that generically display nonanalyticities at certain momenta that resemble the Fermi surfaces of equilibrium non-Fermi liquids. Remarkably these nonequilibrium Fermi surfaces remain sharp even when the bath is at finite temperature, leading to critical power-law decaying correlations at finite temperature, a phenomenon with no analog in equilibrium. We also show that generically there is in-gap current rectification for clean metals lacking inversion symmetry, and explain why this occurs universally regardless of the details of collisions.
A periodically driven Fermi gas coupled to a simple boson bath reaches a non-equilibrium steady-state occupation with sharp non-analyticities at certain momenta. Here, we demonstrate that these non-analyticities behave as emergent Fermi surfaces by showing that they give rise to quantum oscillations of observables with a period controlled by the effective Fermi surface area enclosed by these non-analyticities. However, these oscillations have several striking differences with standard equilibrium quantum oscillations. For example, they remain non-analytic at finite temperatures, their amplitude can survive up to extremely high temperatures comparable to the frequency of the drive, and they can display non-monotonic temperature dependence completely at odds with standard Lifshits-Kosevich behavior.
We demonstrate the existence of a nonequilibrium "Floquet Fermi liquid" state arising in partially filled Floquet Bloch bands weakly coupled to ideal fermionic baths, which possess a collection of "Floquet Fermi surfaces" enclosed inside each other, resembling matryoshka dolls. We elucidate several properties of these states, including their quantum oscillations under magnetic fields which feature slow beating patterns of their amplitude reflecting the different areas of the Floquet Fermi surfaces, consistent with those observed in microwave induced resistance oscillation experiments. We also investigate their specific heat and thermodynamic density of states and demonstrate how by controlling properties of the drive, such as its frequency, one can tune some of the Floquet Fermi surfaces toward nonequilibrium Van Hove singularities without changing the electron density.
We show that the steady state of a periodically driven Bose gas coupled to a thermal bath features emergent Fermi surfaces both in its high temperature and Bose-Einstein-condensate (BEC) states. These emergent Fermi surfaces are non-analyticities in the occupation function as a function of momentum arising from the lack of detailed balance of collisions away from equilibrium. They are stronger in the BEC than in the normal gas, and can be more robust against finite temperature smearing than the usual equilibrium Fermi surfaces of Fermi gases. We also show that they give rise to analogous rich phenomena, such as Friedel oscillations in the density correlations and quantum oscillations in response to applied magnetic fields controlled by their areas, albeit with marked quantitative differences. Our results establish non-equilibrium conditions as a promising alternative pathway to achieve the long-sought-after emergence of Fermi surfaces in bosonic system. We outline strategies to experimentally discover these exotic states in ultra-cold atomic clouds.
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.
We show that time-reflection symmetry in periodically driven (Floquet) quantum systems enables an inherently nonequilibrium phenomenon structurally similar to quantum-mechanical supersymmetry. In particular, we find Floquet analogs of the Witten index that place lower bounds on the degeneracies of states with quasienergies 0 and π. Moreover, we show that in some cases time-reflection symmetry can also interchange fermions and bosons, leading to fermion-boson pairs with opposite quasienergy. We provide a simple class of disordered, interacting, and ergodic Floquet models with an exponentially large number of states at quasienergies 0 and π, which are robust as long as the time-reflection symmetry is preserved. Floquet supersymmetry manifests itself in the evolution of certain local observables as a period-doubling effect with dramatic finite-size scaling, providing a clear signature for experiments.
The study of strongly correlated quantum matter has revealed numerous exotic phases beyond the conventional Landau Fermi liquid paradigm. Non-Fermi liquid (NFL) behavior, characterized by the breakdown of the quasiparticle concept and anomalous scaling laws for thermodynamic and transport properties, is a central theme in this field. While extensively investigated near quantum critical points in condensed matter systems, the emergence of NFL states in non-equilibrium, driven quantum systems, particularly in synthetic quantum matter platforms such as ultracold atomic Bose-Fermi mixtures, remains a frontier of research. This paper explores the theoretical framework and potential mechanisms for the emergence of NFL behavior in Bose-Fermi mixtures subjected to periodic driving (Floquet engineering) or quantum quenches. We review the fundamental properties of Fermi liquids and NFLs, delve into the intricacies of Bose-Fermi mixtures and non-equilibrium dynamics, and propose a methodology for investigating such emergent phenomena. We discuss expected experimental signatures, including anomalous spectral functions, power-law resistivity, and altered entanglement properties, providing a comprehensive perspective on how driving can sculpt novel quantum phases. The findings suggest a rich interplay between bosonic and fermionic degrees of freedom under non-equilibrium conditions, potentially leading to new avenues for quantum control and the discovery of universal NFL physics.