Phase Structure of Driven Quantum Systems

Phys Rev Lett. 2016 Jun 24;116(25):250401. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.250401. Epub 2016 Jun 21.

Abstract

Clean and interacting periodically driven systems are believed to exhibit a single, trivial "infinite-temperature" Floquet-ergodic phase. In contrast, here we show that their disordered Floquet many-body localized counterparts can exhibit distinct ordered phases delineated by sharp transitions. Some of these are analogs of equilibrium states with broken symmetries and topological order, while others-genuinely new to the Floquet problem-are characterized by order and nontrivial periodic dynamics. We illustrate these ideas in driven spin chains with Ising symmetry.