Francisco Machado

ITAMP Fellow | Harvard University



Emergent hydrodynamics in Floquet quantum systems | Francisco Machado

Emergent hydrodynamics in Floquet quantum systems

Bingtian Ye, Francisco Machado, Christopher David White, Roger S. K. Mong, Norman Y. Yao
PRL (2020)
arXiv:1902.01859

Abstract

A tremendous amount of recent attention has focused on characterizing the dynamical properties of periodically driven many-body systems. Here, we use a novel numerical tool termed `density matrix truncation’ (DMT) to investigate the late-time dynamics of large-scale Floquet systems. We find that DMT accurately captures two essential pieces of Floquet physics, namely, prethermalization and late-time heating to infinite temperature. Moreover, by implementing a spatially inhomogeneous drive, we demonstrate that an interplay between Floquet heating and diffusive transport is crucial to understanding the system’s dynamics. Finally, we show that DMT also provides a powerful method for quantitatively capturing the emergence of hydrodynamics in static (un-driven) Hamiltonians; in particular, by simulating the dynamics of generic, large-scale quantum spin chains (up to \(L = 100\)), we are able to directly extract the energy diffusion coefficient.