Effective Hamiltonians, prethermalization, and slow energy absorption in periodically driven many-body systems

Abstract

We establish some general dynamical properties of quantum many-body systems that are subject to a high-frequency periodic driving. We prove that such systems have a quasiconserved extensive quantity ${H}_{*}$, which plays the role of an effective static Hamiltonian. The dynamics of the system (e.g., evolution of any local observable) is well approximated by the evolution with the Hamiltonian ${H}_{*}$ up to time ${\ensuremath{\tau}}_{*}$, which is exponentially large in the driving frequency. We further show that the energy absorption rate is exponentially small in the driving frequency. In cases where ${H}_{*}$ is ergodic, the driven system prethermalizes to a thermal state described by ${H}_{*}$ at intermediate times $t\ensuremath{\lesssim}{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{*}$, eventually heating up to an infinite-temperature state after times $t\ensuremath{\sim}{\ensuremath{\tau}}_{*}$. Our results indicate that rapidly driven many-body systems generically exhibit prethermalization and very slow heating. We briefly discuss implications for experiments which realize topological states by periodic driving.