English

Long-lived period-doubled edge modes of interacting and disorder-free Floquet spin chains

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2022-02-24 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Floquet spin chains have been a venue for understanding topological states of matter that are qualitatively different from their static counterparts by, for example, hosting π\pi edge modes that show stable period-doubled dynamics. However the stability of these edge modes to interactions has traditionally required the system to be many-body localized in order to suppress heating. In contrast, here we show that even in the absence of disorder, and in the presence of bulk heating, π\pi edge modes are long lived. Their lifetime is extracted from exact diagonalization and is found to be non-perturbative in the interaction strength. A tunneling estimate for the lifetime is obtained by mapping the stroboscopic time-evolution to dynamics of a single particle in Krylov subspace. In this subspace, the π\pi edge mode manifests as the quasi-stable edge mode of an inhomogeneous Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model whose dimerization vanishes in the bulk of the Krylov chain.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.13766,
  title  = {Long-lived period-doubled edge modes of interacting and disorder-free Floquet spin chains},
  author = {Daniel J. Yates and Alexander G. Abanov and Aditi Mitra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.13766},
  year   = {2022}
}