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Aperiodically Driven Integrable Systems and Their Emergent Steady States

Sourav Nandy, Arnab Sen, Diptiman Sen

Published Jan 1, 2017• 53 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Does a closed quantum many-body system that is continually driven with a time-dependent Hamiltonian finally reach a steady state? This question has only recently been answered for driving protocols that are periodic in time, where the long-time behavior of the local properties synchronizes with the drive and can be described by an appropriate periodic ensemble. Here, we explore the consequences of breaking the time-periodic structure of the drive with additional aperiodic noise in a class of integrable systems. We show that the resulting unitary dynamics leads to new emergent steady states in at least two cases. While any typical realization of random noise causes eventual heating to an infinite-temperature ensemble for all local properties in spite of the system being integrable, noise that is self-similar in time leads to an entirely different steady state (which we dub the ``geometric generalized Gibbs ensemble'') that emerges only after an astronomically large time scale. To understand the approach to the steady state, we study the temporal behavior of certain coarse-grained quantities in momentum space that fully determine the reduced density matrix for a subsystem with size much smaller than the total system. Such quantities provide a concise description for any drive protocol in integrable systems that are reducible to a free-fermion representation.

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Does a closed quantum many-body system that is continually driven with a time-dependent Hamiltonian finally reach a steady state? This question has only recently been answered for driving protocols that are periodic in time, where the long-time behavior of the local properties synchronizes with the drive and can be described by an appropriate periodic ensemble. Here, we explore the consequences of breaking the time-periodic structure of the drive with additional aperiodic noise in a class of integrable systems. We show that the resulting unitary dynamics leads to new emergent steady states in at least two cases. While any typical realization of random noise causes eventual heating to an infinite-temperature ensemble for all local properties in spite of the system being integrable, noise that is self-similar in time leads to an entirely different steady state (which we dub the ``geometric generalized Gibbs ensemble'') that emerges only after an astronomically large time scale. To understand the approach to the steady state, we study the temporal behavior of certain coarse-grained quantities in momentum space that fully determine the reduced density matrix for a subsystem with size much smaller than the total system. Such quantities provide a concise description for any drive protocol in integrable systems that are reducible to a free-fermion representation.
Driven many-body quantum systems where some parameter in the Hamiltonian is varied quasiperiodically in time may exhibit nonequilibrium steady states that are qualitatively different from their periodically driven counterparts. Here we consider a prototypical integrable spin system, the spin-1/21/21/2 transverse field Ising model in one dimension, in a pulsed magnetic field. The time dependence of the field is taken to be quasiperiodic by choosing the pulses to be of two types that alternate according to a Fibonacci sequence. We show that a steady state emerges after an exponentially long time when local properties (or equivalently, reduced density matrices of subsystems with size much smaller than the full system) are considered. We use the temporal evolution of certain coarse-grained quantities in momentum space to understand this nonequilibrium steady state in more detail and show that unlike the previously known cases, this steady state is neither described by a periodic generalized Gibbs ensemble nor by an infinite temperature ensemble. Finally, we study a toy problem with a single two-level system driven by a Fibonacci sequence; this problem shows how sensitive the nature of the final steady state is to the different parameters.
We investigate a heating phenomenon in periodically driven integrable systems that can be mapped to free-fermion models. We find that heating to the high-temperature state, which is a typical scenario in nonintegrable systems, can also appear in integrable time-periodic systems; the amount of energy absorption rises drastically near a frequency threshold where the Floquet-Magnus expansion diverges. As the driving period increases, we also observe that the effective temperatures of the generalized Gibbs ensemble for conserved quantities go to infinity. By the use of the scaling analysis, we reveal that, in the limit of infinite system size and driving period, the steady state after a long time is equivalent to the infinite-temperature state. We obtain the asymptotic behavior L^{-1} and T^{-2} as to how the steady state approaches the infinite-temperature state as the system size L and the driving period T increase.
When a closed quantum system is driven periodically with period T, it approaches a periodic state synchronized with the drive in which any local observable measured stroboscopically approaches a steady value. For integrable systems, the resulting behavior is captured by a periodic version of a generalized Gibbs ensemble. By contrast, here we show that for generic nonintegrable interacting systems, local observables become independent of the initial state entirely. Essentially, this happens because Floquet eigenstates of the driven system at quasienergy ω(α) consist of a mixture of the exponentially many eigenstates of the undriven Hamiltonian, which are thus drawn from the entire extensive undriven spectrum. This is a form of equilibration which depends only on the Hilbert space of the undriven system and not on any details of its Hamiltonian.
Abstract We study periodically driven closed systems with a long-ranged Hamiltonian by considering a generalized Kitaev chain with pairing terms which decay with distance as a power law characterized by exponent α . Starting from an initial unentangled state, we show that all local quantities synchronize with the driving frequency ω at late times and relax to well-defined steady state values in the thermodynamic limit and after drive cycles for any α and ω . We introduce a distance measure, , that characterizes the approach of the reduced density matrix of a subsystem of l sites to that of the final steady state. We chart out the n dependence of and identify a critical value (which depends only on the time-averaged Hamiltonian) below which they generically decay to zero as . For , in contrast, for with at least one intermediate dynamical transition. An identical behavior is found for relaxation of all non-trivial correlation functions to their steady-state values. We also study the mutual information propagation to understand the nature of the entanglement spreading in space with increasing n for such periodically driven long-ranged systems. We point out existence of qualitatively new features (absent for ) in the space-time dependence of mutual information for , where is the largest critical frequency for the dynamical transition for a given α such as the presence of multiple light cone-like structures which persists even when α is large. We also show that the space-time dependence of the mutual information of long-ranged Hamiltonians with differs qualitatively from those with for any drive frequency and relate this to the behavior of the Floquet group velocity of such driven system.
Generalized Gibbs ensembles have been used as powerful tools to describe the steady state of integrable many-particle quantum systems after a sudden change of the Hamiltonian. Here, we demonstrate numerically that they can be used for a much broader class of problems. We consider integrable systems in the presence of weak perturbations which break both integrability and drive the system to a state far from equilibrium. Under these conditions, we show that the steady state and the time evolution on long timescales can be accurately described by a (truncated) generalized Gibbs ensemble with time-dependent Lagrange parameters, determined from simple rate equations. We compare the numerically exact time evolutions of density matrices for small systems with a theory based on block-diagonal density matrices (diagonal ensemble) and a time-dependent generalized Gibbs ensemble containing only a small number of approximately conserved quantities, using the one-dimensional Heisenberg model with perturbations described by Lindblad operators as an example.