2014/03/12 by Achilleas Lazarides, Arnab Das, Roderich Moessner · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.90.012110
published as Phys. Rev. E 90, 012110 (2014)
arxiv created 2014/03/12 · arxiv updated 2014/08/06
When a closed quantum system is driven periodically with period T, it approaches a periodic state synchronized with the drive in which any local observable measured stroboscopically approaches a steady value. For integrable systems, the resulting behaviour is captured by a periodic version of a generalized Gibbs ensemble. By contrast, here we show that for generic non-integrable interacting systems, local observables become independent of the initial state entirely. Essentially, this happens because Floquet eigenstates of the driven system at quasienergy ωα consist of a mixture of the exponentially many eigenstates of the undriven Hamiltonian which are thus drawn from the entire extensive undriven spectrum. This is a form of equilibration which depends only on the Hilbert space of the undriven system and not on any details of its Hamiltonian.