Floquet conformal field theory
Abstract
Given a two-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT), we propose an analytically solvable setup to study the Floquet dynamics of the CFT, i.e., the dynamics of a CFT subject to a periodic driving. A complete phase diagram in the parameter space can be analytically obtained within our setup. We find two phases: the heating phase and the non-heating phase. In the heating phase, the entanglement entropy keeps growing linearly in time, indicating that the system keeps absorbing energy; in the non-heating phase, the entanglement entropy oscillates periodically in time, i.e., the system is not heated. At the phase transition, the entanglement entropy grows logarithmically in time in a universal way. Furthermore, we can obtain the critical exponent by studying the entanglement evolution near the phase transition. Mathematically, different phases (and phase transition) in a Floquet CFT correspond to different types of Mbius transformations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1805.00031,
title = {Floquet conformal field theory},
author = {Xueda Wen and Jie-Qiang Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.00031},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
are welcome; 19 pages, 1 table; v2: refs added