Staggered-Ladder Quasienergy Spectra for Generic Quasimomentum and Quantum-Dynamical Manifestations

TL;DR

This paper discovers a new regular quasienergy spectrum with a staggered ladder structure in quantum kicked systems at generic quasimomentum, revealing unique dynamical behaviors like resonance suppression and traveling-wave localization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel non-Poisson regular quasienergy spectrum with a staggered ladder structure for the generalized kicked particle at quantum resonance conditions.

Findings

Identifies a new staggered ladder quasienergy spectrum.

Shows suppression of quantum resonances due to this spectrum.

Demonstrates a new form of dynamical localization with traveling waves.

Abstract

A new kind of regular quasienergy (Floquet) spectrum is found for the generalized kicked particle under quantum-resonance conditions at generic quasimomentum, a quantity most relevant in atom-optics experimental realizations of kicked-rotor systems. The new non-Poisson regular spectrum has the structure of a staggered ladder, i.e., it is the superposition of a finite number of ladder subspectra all having the same spacing, which is independent of the nonintegrability of the system. This spectral structure is shown to have distinct quantum-dynamical manifestations: A suppression of quantum resonances and a novel type of dynamical localization characterized by unique features such as traveling-wave components in the time evolution. These phenomena are found to be robust under small variations of the quasimomentum and should therefore be experimentally observable using Bose-Einstein condensates with sufficiently small quasimomentum width.