Statistical prethermalization in randomly kicked many-body classical rotor system

TL;DR

This paper investigates prethermalization phenomena in a classical many-body rotor system under aperiodic drives, revealing different heating suppression regimes depending on the drive's statistical properties and analyzing energy growth via a surprise metric.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of prethermalization in classical rotors under aperiodic drives with different waiting time distributions, highlighting the impact of drive randomness on heating suppression.

Findings

Random drives with infinite-tailed WTD cause algebraic heating suppression.

Quasi-periodic drives with sharp-cutoff WTD lead to exponential heating suppression.

Chaotic heating occurs at late times, with diffusion constants affected by WTD surprise.

Abstract

We explore the phenomena of prethermalization in a many-body classical system of rotors under aperiodic drives characterised by waiting time distribution (WTD), where the waiting time is defined as the time between two consecutive kicks. We consider here two types of aperiodic drives: random and quasi-periodic. We observe a short-lived pseudo-thermal regime with algebraic suppression of heating for the random drive where WTD has an infinite tail, as observed for Poisson and binomial kick sequences. On the other hand, quasi-periodic drive characterised by a WTD with a sharp cut-off, observed for Thue-Morse sequence of kick, leads to prethermal region where heating is exponentially suppressed. The kinetic energy growth is analyzed using an average surprise associated with WTD quantifying the randomness of drive. In all of the aperiodic drives we obtain the chaotic heating regime for late time, however, the diffusion constant gets renormalized by the average surprise of WTD in comparison to the periodic case.