Stroboscopic prethermalization in weakly interacting periodically driven systems

Understand

Time-periodic driving provides a promising route to engineer non-trivial states in quantum many-body systems.

• However, while it has been shown that the dynamics of integrable systems can synchronize with the driving into a non-trivial periodic motion, generic non-integrable systems are expected to heat up until they display a trivial infinite-temperature behavior.
• In this paper we show that a quasi-periodic time evolution over many periods can also emerge in systems with weak integrability breaking, with a clear separation of the timescales for synchronization and the eventual approach of the infinite-temperature state.
• This behavior is the analogue of prethermalization in quenched systems.