2009/04/30 by Arnab Das · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.82.172402
published as Phys. Rev. B, Vol. 82, 172402 (2010) · Presentation modified; version accepted in Phys. Rev. B
arxiv created 2010/11/01 · arxiv updated 2010/11/09
We show that when a quantum many-body system is subjected to coherent periodic driving, the response may exhibit exotic freezing behavior in high driving frequency (ω) regime. In a periodically driven classical thermodynamic system, freezing at high ω occurs when 1/ω is much smaller than the characteristic relaxation time of the system, and hence the freezing always increases there as ω is increased. Here, in the contrary, we see surprising non-monotonic freezing behavior of the response with ω, showing curious peak-valley structure. Quite interestingly, the entire system tends to freeze almost absolutely (the freezing peaks) when driven with a certain combination of driving parameters values (amplitude and ω) due to coherent suppression of dynamics of the quantum many-body modes, which has no classical analog. We demonstrate this new freezing phenomenon analytically (supported by large-scale numerics) for a general class of integrable quantum spin systems.