Periodically driven integrable systems with long-range pair potentials

TL;DR

This paper investigates the relaxation, entanglement spreading, and dynamical transitions in periodically driven long-range quantum systems, revealing new features like multiple light cones and critical behaviors depending on the decay exponent.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of long-range Kitaev chains under periodic driving, identifying critical exponents, dynamical transitions, and novel entanglement propagation phenomena.

Findings

Local quantities relax to steady states after many drive cycles.

A critical decay exponent $eta_c$ determines different relaxation behaviors.

Multiple light cone structures appear in entanglement spreading for certain parameters.

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 $\alpha$. Starting from an initial unentangled state, we show that all local quantities relax to well-defined steady state values in the thermodynamic limit and after $n \gg 1$ drive cycles for any $\alpha$ and driving frequency $\omega$. We introduce a distance measure, $\mathcal{D}_l(n)$, that characterizes the approach of the reduced density matrix of a subsystem of $l$ sites to its final steady state. We chart out the $n$ dependence of ${\mathcal D}_l(n)$ and identify a critical value $\alpha=\alpha_c$ below which they generically decay to zero as $(\omega/n)^{1/2}$. For $\alpha > \alpha_c$, in contrast, ${\mathcal D}_l(n) \sim (\omega/n)^{3/2}[(\omega/n)^{1/2}]$ for $\omega \to \infty [0]$ with at least one intermediate dynamical transition. We also study the mutual information propagation to understand the nature of the entanglement spreading in space with increasing $n$ for such systems. We point out existence of qualitatively new features in the space-time dependence of mutual information for $\omega < \omega^{(1)}_c$, where $\omega^{(1)}_c$ is the largest critical frequency for the dynamical transition for a given $\alpha$. One such feature is the presence of {\it multiple} light cone-like structures which persists even when $\alpha$ is large. We also show that the nature of space-time dependence of the mutual information of long-ranged Hamiltonians with $\alpha \le 2$ differs qualitatively from their short-ranged counterparts with $\alpha > 2$ for any drive frequency and relate this difference to the behavior of the Floquet group velocity of such driven system.