English

Dynamical Stability of a Many-body Kapitza Pendulum

Quantum Physics 2015-11-10 v1 Quantum Gases

Abstract

We consider a many-body generalization of the Kapitza pendulum: the periodically-driven sine-Gordon model. We show that this interacting system is dynamically stable to periodic drives with finite frequency and amplitude. This finding is in contrast to the common belief that periodically-driven unbounded interacting systems should always tend to an absorbing infinite-temperature state. The transition to an unstable absorbing state is described by a change in the sign of the kinetic term in the effective Floquet Hamiltonian and controlled by the short-wavelength degrees of freedom. We investigate the stability phase diagram through an analytic high-frequency expansion, a self-consistent variational approach, and a numeric semiclassical calculations. Classical and quantum experiments are proposed to verify the validity of our results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.05660,
  title  = {Dynamical Stability of a Many-body Kapitza Pendulum},
  author = {Roberta Citro and Emanuele G. Dalla Torre and Luca DÁlessio and Anatoli Polkovnikov and Mehrtash Babadi and Takashi Oka and Eugene Demler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.05660},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

11 pages, 11 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:10:26.428Z