We study the many-body localization (MBL) transition of Floquet eigenstates in a driven, interacting fermionic chain with an incommensurate Aubry-André potential and a time-periodic hopping amplitude as a function of the drive frequency ${\omega }_D$ using exact diagonalization (ED). We find that the nature of the Floquet eigenstates change from ergodic to Floquet-MBL with increasing frequency; moreover, for a significant range of intermediate ${\omega }_D$, the Floquet eigenstates exhibit nontrivial fractal dimensions. We find a possible transition from the ergodic to this multifractal phase followed by a gradual crossover to the MBL phase as the drive frequency is increased. We also study the fermion autocorrelation function, entanglement entropy, normalized participation ratio (NPR), fermion transport, and the inverse participation ratio (IPR) as a function of ${\omega }_D$. We show that the autocorrelation, fermion transport, and NPR display qualitatively different characteristics (compared to their behavior in the ergodic and MBL regions) for the range of ${\omega }_D$ which supports multifractal eigenstates. In contrast, the entanglement growth in this frequency range tend to have similar features as in the MBL regime; its rate of growth is controlled by ${\omega }_D$. Our analysis thus indicates that the multifractal nature of Floquet-MBL eigenstates can be detected by studying autocorrelation function and fermionic transport of these driven chains. We support our numerical results with a semianalytic expression of the Floquet Hamiltonian obtained using Floquet perturbation theory (FPT) and discuss possible experiments which can test our predictions.

• Received 13 August 2021
• Accepted 23 December 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.024301