Asymptotic Floquet states of open quantum systems: The role of interaction

Abstract

We investigate the asymptotic state of a periodically driven many-body quantum system which is weakly coupled to an environment. The combined action of the modulations and the environment steers the system towards a state being characterized by a time-periodic density operator. To resolve this asymptotic non-equilibrium state at stroboscopic instants of time, we introduce the dissipative Floquet map, evaluate the stroboscopic density operator as its eigen-element and elucidate how particle interactions affect properties of the density operator. We illustrate the idea with a periodically modulated Bose-Hubbard dimer and discuss the relations between the interaction-induced bifurcations in a mean-field dynamics and changes in the characteristics of the genuine quantum many-body state. We argue that Floquet maps provide insight into the system relaxation towards its asymptotic state and may help to understand whether it is possible (or not) to construct a stroboscopic time-independent generator mimicking the action of the original time-dependent one.