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arXiv:2604.13027

Floquet Many-Body Cages

Tom Ben-Ami, Roderich Moessner, Markus Heyl

quant-phcond-mat.quant-gasSubmitted Apr 14, 2026• Announced Apr 15, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Many-body cages have very recently emerged as a general route for nonergodic behaviour in quantum matter. Here, we show that new types of many-body cages can be engineered in Floquet circuits with the potential to realize novel nonequilibrium quantum states. For that purpose, we first identify an explicit, general construction of Floquet circuits capable of hosting many-body cages. We then present a generic strategy to engineer and structure Floquet many-body cages. We demonstrate the developed scheme for the quantum hard disk model as a generic constrained model system, realizable for instance in Rydberg atom arrays. We construct Floquet circuits yielding Floquet many-body cages with topological properties and $π$-quasienergy modes, implying `time crystalline' spatiotemporal order. Our results can be directly extended to general quantum circuits, thus providing a new tool to engineer nonequilibrium behaviour in driven systems.

Comments
9 pages, 6+2 figures

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Many-body cages have very recently emerged as a general route for nonergodic behaviour in quantum matter. Here, we show that new types of many-body cages can be engineered in Floquet circuits with the potential to realize novel nonequilibrium quantum states. For that purpose, we first identify an explicit, general construction of Floquet circuits capable of hosting many-body cages. We then present a generic strategy to engineer and structure Floquet many-body cages. We demonstrate the developed scheme for the quantum hard disk model as a generic constrained model system, realizable for instance in Rydberg atom arrays. We construct Floquet circuits yielding Floquet many-body cages with topological properties and πππ-quasienergy modes, implying `time crystalline' spatiotemporal order. Our results can be directly extended to general quantum circuits, thus providing a new tool to engineer nonequilibrium behaviour in driven systems.
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We show how second-order Floquet engineering can be employed to realize systems in which many-body localization coexists with topological properties in a driven system. This allows one to implement and dynamically control a symmetry protected topologically ordered qubit even at high energies, overcoming the roadblock that the respective states cannot be prepared as ground states of nearest-neighbor Hamiltonians. Floquet engineering-the idea that a periodically driven nonequilibrium system can effectively emulate the physics of a different Hamiltonian-is exploited to approximate an effective three-body interaction among spins in one dimension, using time-dependent two-body interactions only. In the effective system, emulated topology and disorder coexist, which provides an intriguing insight into the interplay of many-body localization that defies our standard understanding of thermodynamics and into the topological phases of matter, which are of fundamental and technological importance. We demonstrate explicitly how combining Floquet engineering, topology, and many-body localization allows one to harvest the advantages (time-dependent control, topological protection, and reduction of heating, respectively) of each of these subfields while protecting them from their disadvantages (heating, static control parameters, and strong disorder).
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.
Anomalous Floquet topological phases are a hallmark, without a static analog, of periodically driven systems. Recently, Quantum Floquet Engineering has emerged as an interesting approach to cavity-QED materials, which recovers the physics of Floquet engineering in its semi-classical limit. However, the mapping between these two widely different scenarios remains mysterious in many aspects. We discuss the emergence of anomalous topological phases in cavity-QED materials, and link topological phase transitions in the many-body spectrum with those in the 000- and πππ-gaps of Floquet quasienergies. Our results allow to establish the microscopic origin of an emergent discrete time-translation symmetry in the matter sector, and link the physics of isolated many-body systems with that of periodically driven ones. Finally, the relation between many-body and Floquet topological invariants is discussed, as well as the bulk-edge correspondence.
Recent work has shown that a variety of novel phases of matter arise in periodically driven Floquet systems. Among these are many-body localized phases which spontaneously break global symmetries and exhibit novel multiplets of Floquet eigenstates separated by quantized quasienergies. Here we show that these properties are stable to all weak local deformations of the underlying Floquet drives---including those that explicitly break the defining symmetries---and that the models considered until now occupy submanifolds within these larger ``absolutely stable'' phases. While these absolutely stable phases have no explicit global symmetries, they spontaneously break Hamiltonian-dependent emergent symmetries, and thus continue to exhibit the novel multiplet structure. The multiplet structure in turn encodes characteristic oscillations of the emergent order parameter at multiples of the fundamental period. Altogether these phases exhibit a form of simultaneous long-range order in space and time which is new to quantum systems. We describe how this spatiotemporal order can be detected in experiments involving quenches from a broad class of initial states.