Physics and Astronomy - Quantum Nano Seminar
Luca D'Alessio, Boston University
Title: "Great Time With Periodically Driven Systems"
Abstract: When a classical or quantum systems are driven periodically in time new,
surprising phenomena can appear. One example is the phenomenon known as
dynamical localization in which the driven system does not heat up beyond
a certain threshold. In non-interacting systems, this phenomenon as been
known for a long time and has been used to generate interesting state
using a properly chosen driving protocol. However, it was believed that
driven ergodic systems will always heat without bound. Here, on the
contrary, we report strong evidence of dynamical localization transition
in periodically driven ergodic systems in the thermodynamic limit. This
phenomenon is reminiscent of many-body localization in energy space. We
report numerical evidence based on exact diagonalization of small spin
chains and theoretical arguments based on the Magnus expansion. Our
findings are valid for both classical and quantum systems. We speculate on
the possible experimental applications of these ideas.