The Real-Time Correlation Function of Floquet Conformal Fields

TL;DR

This paper derives exact formulas for the real-time evolution of Floquet-driven conformal field theories, extending previous stroboscopic analyses to arbitrary times and revealing new insights into their curved spacetime dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first exact real-time correlation functions for Floquet CFTs, broadening understanding of their non-stroboscopic dynamics and curved spacetime interpretations.

Findings

Exact formulas for real-time correlation functions derived

New interpretation of non-stroboscopic time evolution in curved spacetime

Identification of heating and non-heating phases in Floquet CFTs

Abstract

Conformal field theories (CFT) play an important role in quantum field theories as they allow for exact studies that are hard to access without the conformal symmetries in place. A remarkable recent development is the application of conformal field theory to periodically driven systems, the so-called Floquet-driven CFTs. A number of recent works have found that there are classes of periodically driven (1+1)-dimensional CFTs that can be analytically solved, and that show both heating and non-heating phases, as well as unusual properties in terms of information scrambling. Hitherto, most results have focused on the dynamics of such models at stroboscopic times, i.e. samples taken at each period of the time evolution. In this paper, we consider time-evolution at arbitrary real times and derive formulas for the exact time-propagation of heating and non-heating classes of Floquet-driven CFTs. This requires a subtle treatment of non-stroboscopic time that leads to different interpretations in terms of curved space-time dynamics in these systems compared to previous results in the literature.