Parametric Heating in a 2D Periodically Driven Bosonic System: Beyond the Weakly Interacting Regime

We experimentally investigate the effects of parametric instabilities on the short-time heating process of periodically driven bosons in 2D optical lattices with a continuous transverse (tube) degree of freedom. We analyze three types of periodic drives: (i) linear along the x-lattice direction only, (ii) linear along the lattice diagonal, and (iii) circular in the lattice plane. In all cases, we demonstrate that the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) decay is dominated by the emergence of unstable Bogoliubov modes, rather than scattering in higher Floquet bands, in agreement with recent theoretical predictions. The observed BEC depletion rates are much higher when shaking along both the x and y directions, as opposed to only x or only y. We also report an explosion of the decay rates at large drive amplitudes and suggest a phenomenological description beyond the Bogoliubov theory. In this strongly coupled regime, circular drives heat faster than diagonal drives, which illustrates the nontrivial dependence of the heating on the choice of drive.