Suppression of heating by long-range interactions in periodically driven spin chains

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mechanism to reduce heating in periodically driven quantum spin chains by leveraging long-range interactions, spectrum fragmentation, and specific initial conditions, without relying on disorder or high-frequency driving.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel approach to suppress heating in driven many-body systems using long-range interactions and spectrum fragmentation, applicable beyond one-dimensional models.

Findings

Heating decreases with lower driving frequency in certain regimes.

Spectrum fragmentation into bands with increasing gaps stabilizes the system.

The mechanism is robust to local perturbations and applicable to higher dimensions.

Abstract

We propose a mechanism to suppress heating in periodically driven many-body quantum systems by employing sufficiently long-range interactions and experimentally relevant initial conditions. The mechanism is robust to local perturbations and does \emph{not} rely on disorder or high driving frequencies. Instead, it makes use of an approximate fragmentation of the many-body spectrum of the non-driven system into bands, with band gaps that grow with the system size. We show that when these systems are driven, there is a regime where \emph{decreasing} the driving frequency \emph{decreases} heating and entanglement build-up. This is demonstrated numerically for a prototypical system of spins in one dimension, but the results can be readily generalized to higher dimensions.