Non equilibrium phase transitions and Floquet Kibble-Zurek scaling

Understand

We study the slow crossing of non-equilibrium quantum phase transitions in periodically-driven systems.

• We explicitly consider a spin chain with a uniform time-dependent magnetic field and focus on the Floquet state that is adiabatically connected to the ground state of the static model.
• We find that this {\it Floquet ground state} undergoes a series of quantum phase transitions characterized by a non-trivial topology.
• To dinamically probe these transitions, we propose to start with a large driving frequency and slowly decrease it as a function of time.