Suppression of heating in quantum spin clusters under periodic driving as a dynamic localization effect

Abstract

We investigate numerically and analytically the heating process in ergodic clusters of interacting spins 1/2 subjected to periodic pulses of external magnetic field. Our findings indicate that there is a threshold for the pulse strength below which the heating is suppressed. This threshold decreases with the increase of the cluster size, approaching zero in the thermodynamic limit; yet it should be observable in clusters with fairly large Hilbert spaces. We obtain the above threshold quantitatively as a condition for the breakdown of the golden rule in the second-order perturbation theory. It is caused by the phenomenon of dynamic localization.