Selective Remote Dissipation of an Off-resonant State via Indirect Driving

TL;DR

The paper demonstrates how local periodic driving can selectively induce dissipation in an undriven quantum state through Floquet-engineered channels, enabling control over decay processes in structured environments.

Contribution

It introduces a method to control remote dissipation via Floquet theory, showing how drive parameters can switch or suppress decay channels in a minimal quantum system.

Findings

Periodic driving activates a remote decay channel for the undriven level.

Decay rates can be tuned or suppressed by adjusting drive amplitude.

Theoretical predictions match numerical simulations of the Schrödinger equation.

Abstract

We show how local periodic driving can be used to control dissipation in a structured environment in a highly selective manner. As a minimal setting, we consider two discrete levels coupled to a one-dimensional tight-binding continuum with a finite bandwidth, where only one level is driven while the other remains undriven. Without driving, both bare energies are placed outside the static continuum band so that neither level decays. We demonstrate that the drive can nevertheless activate a selective remote dissipation channel: the undriven level acquires a finite decay rate, whereas the driven level can remain long-lived. The mechanism is clarified within Floquet theory. Periodic driving generates photon-assisted channels shifted by integer multiples of the drive frequency, effectively creating a ladder of drive-shifted continuum sidebands (Floquet channels). A decay channel for the undriven level opens once its bare energy overlaps an open sideband accessed via drive-enabled pathways; in the tight-binding example, the decay is strongly enhanced near the sideband edge due to the increased density of states. The dominant remote pathway is controlled by Bessel-weighted couplings and can be switched and strongly suppressed by tuning the drive amplitude. We verify these predictions by direct numerical integration of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation. We also formulate a complex-eigenvalue problem for the Floquet Hamiltonian by eliminating the continuum via a Brillouin--Wigner--Feshbach projection, and show that the pole-implied decay rate quantitatively reproduces the time-domain decay envelope.