How periodic driving heats a disordered quantum spin chain

Understand

We study the energy absorption in real time of a disordered quantum spin chain subjected to coherent monochromatic periodic driving.

• We determine characteristic fingerprints of the well-known ergodic (Floquet-ETH for slow driving/weak disorder) and many-body localized (Floquet-MBL for fast driving/strong disorder) phases.
• In addition, we identify an intermediate regime, where the energy density of the system -- unlike the entanglement entropy a local and bounded observable -- grows logarithmically slowly over a very large time window.