Floquet-Magnus Theory and Generic Transient Dynamics in Periodically Driven Many-Body Quantum Systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework using the Floquet-Magnus expansion to understand the finite-time transient dynamics of many-body quantum systems under periodic driving, revealing the validity time scale and phenomena like prethermalization.

Contribution

It establishes a rigorous connection between the truncated Floquet-Magnus expansion and finite-time dynamics, providing insights into the validity time scale and dynamical phenomena.

Findings

Truncated FM expansion accurately describes finite-time dynamics.

Identifies a reliable time scale for the FM expansion's validity.

Discusses phenomena like prethermalization and dynamical localization.

Abstract

This work explores a fundamental dynamical structure for a wide range of many-body quantum systems under periodic driving. Generically, in the thermodynamic limit, such systems are known to heat up to infinite temperature states after infinite-time evolution, irrespective of dynamical details. In the present study, instead of considering infinitely long-time scale, we aim to provide a framework to understand the long but finite time behavior, namely the transient dynamics. In the analysis, we focus on the Floquet-Magnus (FM) expansion that gives a formal expression of the effective Hamiltonian on the system. Although in general the full series expansion is not convergent in the thermodynamics limit, we give a clear relationship between the FM expansion and the transient dynamics. More precisely, we rigorously show that a truncated version of the FM expansion accurately describes the exact dynamics for a finite-time scale. Our result reveals a reliable time scale of the validity of the FM expansion, which can be comparable to the experimental time scale. Furthermore, we discuss several dynamical phenomena, such as the effect of small integrability breaking, efficient numerical simulation of periodically driven systems, dynamical localization and thermalization. Especially on thermalization, we discuss generic scenario of the prethermalization phenomenon in periodically driven systems.