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arXiv:2605.26250

Krylov Complexity in Periodically Driven CFTs and Critical Fermions

Ankit Gill, Anurag Sarkar

hep-thcond-mat.str-elquant-phSubmitted May 25, 2026• Announced May 27, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We study Krylov construction in periodically driven conformal field theories and their lattice realisations via critical fermions. Two types of driving are considered: a square-wave drive and a continuous sinusoidal drive. Using the Arnoldi construction, we examine Arnoldi coefficients and return amplitudes in periodically driven conformal field theories in the heating and non-heating phases. In the heating phase, the Arnoldi coefficients approach unity exponentially; in contrast, in the non-heating phase, they exhibit oscillatory behaviour. For the lattice realisations, we further analyse the Krylov complexity of the correlation matrix, quasi energy level statistics, and the graph structure induced by the Floquet operator. Although the two drives exhibit similar Krylov growth on the CFT side, their lattice realisations exhibit markedly different spectral and graph signatures, indicating distinct mechanisms governing the transition between the heating and non-heating phases.

Comments
46 pages, 25 figures

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We study Krylov construction in periodically driven conformal field theories and their lattice realisations via critical fermions. Two types of driving are considered: a square-wave drive and a continuous sinusoidal drive. Using the Arnoldi construction, we examine Arnoldi coefficients and return amplitudes in periodically driven conformal field theories in the heating and non-heating phases. In the heating phase, the Arnoldi coefficients approach unity exponentially; in contrast, in the non-heating phase, they exhibit oscillatory behaviour. For the lattice realisations, we further analyse the Krylov complexity of the correlation matrix, quasi energy level statistics, and the graph structure induced by the Floquet operator. Although the two drives exhibit similar Krylov growth on the CFT side, their lattice realisations exhibit markedly different spectral and graph signatures, indicating distinct mechanisms governing the transition between the heating and non-heating phases.
A bstract In this study, we analyze Krylov Complexity in two-dimensional conformal field theories subjected to deformed SL(2 , ℝ) Hamiltonians. In the Vacuum state, we find that the K-Complexity exhibits a universal phase structure. The phase structure involves the K-Complexity exhibiting an oscillatory behaviour in the non-heating phase, which contrasts with the exponential growth observed in the heating phase, while it displays polynomial growth at the phase boundary. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to compute the K-Complexity of a light operator in excited states, considering both large-c CFT and free field theory. In the free field theory, we find a state-independent phase structure of K-Complexity. However, in the large-c CFT, the behaviour varies, with the K-Complexity once again displaying exponential growth in the heating phase and polynomial growth at the phase boundary. Notably, the precise exponent governing this growth depends on the heaviness of the state under examination. In the non-heating phase, we observe a transition in K-Complexity behaviour from oscillatory to exponential growth, akin to findings in [1], as it represents a special case within the non-heating phase.
Abstract We study the properties of a conformal field theory (CFT) driven periodically with a continuous protocol characterized by a frequency ωD. Such a drive, in contrast to its discrete counterparts (such as square pulses or periodic kicks), does not admit exact analytical solution for the evolution operator U. In this work, we develop a Floquet perturbation theory which provides an analytic, albeit perturbative, result for U that matches exact numerics in the large drive amplitude limit. We find that the drive yields the well-known heating (hyperbolic) and non-heating (elliptic) phases separated by transition lines (parabolic phase boundary). Using this and starting from a primary state of the CFT, we compute the return probability (Pn), equal (Cn) and unequal (Gn) time two-point primary correlators, energy density(En), and the mth Renyi entropy ( Snm {S}_n^m Snm​ S n m ) after n drive cycles. Our results show that below a crossover stroboscopic time scale nc, Pn, En and Gn exhibits universal power law behavior as the transition is approached either from the heating or the non-heating phase; this crossover scale diverges at the transition. We also study the emergent spatial structure of Cn, Gn and En for the continuous protocol and find emergence of spatial divergences of Cn and Gn in both the heating and non-heating phases. We express our results for Snm {S}_n^m Snm​ S n m and Cn in terms of conformal blocks and provide analytic expressions for these quantities in several limiting cases. Finally we relate our results to those obtained from exact numerics of a driven lattice model.
In this paper and its upcoming sequel, we study nonequilibrium dynamics in driven (1 + 1)-dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs) with periodic, quasiperiodic, and random driving.We study a soluble family of drives in which the Hamiltonian only involves the energy-momentum density spatially modulated at a single wavelength.The resulting time evolution is then captured by a Möbius coordinate transformation.In this paper, we establish the general framework and focus on the first two classes.In periodically driven CFTs, we generalize earlier work and study the generic features of entanglement and energy evolution in different phases, i.e., the heating and nonheating phases and the phase transition between them.In quasiperiodically driven CFTs, we mainly focus on the case of driving with a Fibonacci sequence.We find that (i) the nonheating phases form a Cantor set of measure zero; (ii) in the heating phase, the Lyapunov exponents (which characterize the growth rate of the entanglement entropy and energy) exhibit self-similarity, and can be arbitrarily small; (iii) the heating phase exhibits periodicity in the location of spatial structures at the Fibonacci times; (iv) one can find exactly the nonheating fixed point, where the entanglement entropy and energy oscillate at the Fibonacci numbers, but grow logarithmically and polynomially at the non-Fibonacci numbers; (v) for certain choices of driving Hamiltonians, the nonheating phases of the Fibonacci driving CFT can be mapped to the energy spectrum of electrons propagating in a Fibonacci quasicrystal.In addition, another quasiperiodically driven CFT with an Aubry-André-type sequence is also studied.We compare the CFT results to lattice calculations and find remarkable agreement.
Krylov Complexity in 2d2d2d CFTs with SL(2,R)(2,\mathbb{R})(2,R) deformed Hamiltonians
In this study, we analyze Krylov Complexity in two-dimensional conformal field theories subjected to deformed SL(2,R)(2,\mathbb{R})(2,R) Hamiltonians. In the vacuum state, we find that the K-complexity exhibits a universal phase structure. The phase structure involves the K-complexity exhibiting an oscillatory behaviour in the non-heating phase, which contrasts with the exponential growth observed in the heating phase, while it displays polynomial growth at the phase boundary. Furthermore, we extend our analysis to compute the K-complexity of a light operator in excited states, considering both large-c CFT and free field theory. In the free field theory, we find a state-independent phase structure of K-complexity. However, in the large-c CFT, the behavior varies, with the K-Complexity once again displaying exponential growth in the heating phase and polynomial growth at the phase boundary. Notably, the precise exponent governing this growth depends on the heaviness of the state under examination. In the non-heating phase, we observe a transition in K-complexity behavior from oscillatory to exponential growth, akin to findings in [1], as it represents a special case within the non-heating phase.
In this sequel (to [Phys. Rev. Res. 3, 023044(2021)], arXiv:2006.10072), we study randomly driven (1+1) ( 1 + 1 ) dimensional conformal field theories (CFTs), a family of quantum many-body systems with soluble non-equilibrium quantum dynamics. The sequence of driving Hamiltonians is drawn from an independent and identically distributed random ensemble. At each driving step, the deformed Hamiltonian only involves the energy-momentum density spatially modulated at a single wavelength and therefore induces a Möbius transformation on the complex coordinates. The non-equilibrium dynamics is then determined by the corresponding sequence of Möbius transformations, from which the Lyapunov exponent \lambda_L λ L is defined. We use Furstenberg’s theorem to classify the dynamical phases and show that except for a few exceptional points that do not satisfy Furstenberg’s criteria, the random drivings always lead to a heating phase with the total energy growing exponentially in the number of driving steps n n and the subsystem entanglement entropy growing linearly in n n with a slope proportional to central charge c c and the Lyapunov exponent \lambda_L λ L . On the contrary, the subsystem entanglement entropy at an exceptional point could grow as \sqrt{n} n while the total energy remains to grow exponentially. In addition, we show that the distributions of the operator evolution and the energy density peaks are also useful characterizations to distinguish the heating phase from the exceptional points: the heating phase has both distributions to be continuous, while the exceptional points could support finite convex combinations of Dirac measures depending on their specific type. In the end, we compare the field theory results with the lattice model calculations for both the entanglement and energy evolution and find remarkably good agreement.
Krylov complexity is an important dynamical quantity with relevance to the study of operator growth and quantum chaos and has recently been much studied for various time-independent systems. We initiate the study of K complexity in time-dependent (driven) quantum systems. For periodic time-dependent (Floquet) systems, we develop a natural method for doing the Krylov construction and then define (state and operator) K complexity for such systems. Focusing on kicked systems, in particular the quantum kicked rotor on a torus, we provide a detailed numerical study of the time dependence of Arnoldi coefficients as well as of the K complexity with the system coupling constant interpolating between the weak and strong coupling regimes. We also study the growth of the Krylov subspace dimension as a function of the system coupling constant.