2014/12/31 by Dmitry A. Abanin, Dmitry Abanin, Wojciech De Roeck +1 · 193 citations
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Adiabatic process #Delocalized electron #Exponential function #Floquet theory #Operator (biology) #Organic and Molecular Conductors Research #Phase (matter) #Phase diagram #Quantum many-body systems #Sequence (biology) #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Trajectory #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.str-el
paper · pdf · open access · doi:10.1016/j.aop.2016.03.010
published in Annals of Physics 372, 1-11 (Elsevier BV) · 8 pages, 3 figures. Presentation improved, appendix added
arxiv created 2015/08/11 · openalex publication_date 2016/04/30 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · arxiv updated 2017/01/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a theory of periodically driven, many-body localized (MBL) systems. We argue that MBL persists under periodic driving at high enough driving frequency: The Floquet operator (evolution operator over one driving period) can be represented as an exponential of an effective time-independent Hamiltonian, which is a sum of quasi-local terms and is itself fully MBL. We derive this result by constructing a sequence of canonical transformations to remove the time-dependence from the original Hamiltonian. When the driving evolves smoothly in time, the theory can be sharpened by estimating the probability of adiabatic Landau-Zener transitions at many-body level crossings. In all cases, we argue that there is delocalization at sufficiently low frequency. We propose a phase diagram of driven MBL systems.