Fermi's golden rule for heating in strongly driven Floquet systems

We study heating dynamics in isolated quantum many-body systems driven periodically at high frequency and large amplitude. Combining the high-frequency expansion for the Floquet Hamiltonian with Fermi's golden rule (FGR), we develop a master equation termed the Floquet FGR. Unlike the conventional one, the Floquet FGR correctly describes heating dynamics, including the prethermalization regime, even for strong drives, under which the Floquet Hamiltonian is significantly dressed, and nontrivial Floquet engineering is present. The Floquet FGR depends on system size only weakly, enabling us to analyze the thermodynamic limit with small-system calculations. Our results also indicate that, during heating, the system approximately stays in the thermal state for the Floquet Hamiltonian with a gradually rising temperature.

Automated summary

This study focuses on the heating dynamics in isolated quantum many-body systems driven periodically at high frequency and large amplitude. The developed Floquet FGR equation accurately describes the heating dynamics, even under strong drives, with weak dependence on system size. During heating, the system approximately maintains a thermal state with a gradually increasing temperature.