@article {2108, title = {Absence of Thermalization in Finite Isolated Interacting Floquet Systems}, journal = {Physical Review B}, volume = {97}, year = {2018}, month = {2018/01/29}, pages = {014311}, abstract = {

Conventional wisdom suggests that the long time behavior of isolated interacting periodically driven (Floquet) systems is a featureless maximal entropy state characterized by an infinite temperature. Efforts to thwart this uninteresting fixed point include adding sufficient disorder to realize a Floquet many-body localized phase or working in a narrow region of drive frequencies to achieve glassy non-thermal behavior at long time. Here we show that in clean systems the Floquet eigenstates can exhibit non-thermal behavior due to finite system size. We consider a one-dimensional system of spinless fermions with nearest-neighbor interactions where the interaction term is driven. Interestingly, even with no static component of the interaction, the quasienergy spectrum contains gaps and a significant fraction of the Floquet eigenstates, at all quasienergies, have non-thermal average doublon densities. We show that this non-thermal behavior arises due to emergent integrability at large interaction strength and discuss how the integrability breaks down with power-law behavior in system size.

}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevB.97.014311}, url = {https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.97.014311}, author = {Karthik Seetharam and Paraj Titum and Michael Kolodrubetz and Gil Refael} } @article {2062, title = {Disorder induced transitions in resonantly driven Floquet Topological Insulators}, journal = {Physical Review B}, volume = {96}, year = {2017}, month = {2017/08/16}, pages = {054207}, abstract = {

We investigate the effects of disorder in Floquet topological insulators (FTIs) occurring in semiconductor quantum wells. Such FTIs are induced by resonantly driving a transition between the valence and conduction band. We show that when disorder is added, the topological nature of such FTIs persists as long as there is a mobility gap at the resonant quasi-energy. For strong enough disorder, this gap closes and all the states become localized as the system undergoes a transition to a trivial insulator. Interestingly, the effects of disorder are not necessarily adverse: we show that in the same quantum well, disorder can also induce a transition from a trivial to a topological system, thereby establishing a Floquet Topological Anderson Insulator (FTAI). We identify the conditions on the driving field necessary for observing such a transition.

}, doi = {10.1103/PhysRevB.96.054207}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02956}, author = {Paraj Titum and Netanel H. Lindner and Gil Refael} }