Absence of thermalization in finite isolated interacting Floquet systems

Karthik Seetharam, Paraj Titum, Michael Kolodrubetz, and Gil Refael
Phys. Rev. B 97, 014311 – Published 29 January 2018

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that the long-time behavior of isolated interacting periodically driven (Floquet) systems is a featureless maximal-entropy state characterized by an infinite temperature. Efforts to thwart this uninteresting fixed point include adding sufficient disorder to realize a Floquet many-body localized phase or working in a narrow region of drive frequencies to achieve glassy nonthermal behavior at long time. Here we show that in clean systems the Floquet eigenstates can exhibit nonthermal behavior due to finite system size. We consider a one-dimensional system of spinless fermions with nearest-neighbor interactions where the interaction term is driven. Interestingly, even with no static component of the interaction, the quasienergy spectrum contains gaps and a significant fraction of the Floquet eigenstates, at all quasienergies, have nonthermal average doublon densities. We show that this nonthermal behavior arises due to emergent integrability at large interaction strength and discuss how the integrability breaks down with power-law dependence on system size.

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  • Received 8 November 2017
  • Revised 6 January 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.97.014311

©2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Karthik Seetharam1,*, Paraj Titum1,2,†, Michael Kolodrubetz3,4,5,‡, and Gil Refael1,§

  • 1Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Caltech, Pasadena, California 91125, USA
  • 2Joint Quantum Institute and Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science, NIST/University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA
  • 3Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 4Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 5Department of Physics, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080, USA

  • *kseethar@caltech.edu
  • paraj@umd.edu
  • mkolodru@utdallas.edu
  • §refael@caltech.edu

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Issue

Vol. 97, Iss. 1 — 1 January 2018

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