Positivity of the spectral densities of retarded Floquet Green functions

Abstract

Periodically driven nonequilibrium many-body systems are interesting because they have a quasi-energy spectra, which can be tailored by controlling the external driving fields. We derive the general spectral representation of retarded Green functions in the Floquet regime, thereby generalizing the well-known Lehmann representation from equilibrium many-body physics. The derived spectral Floquet representation allows us to prove the nonnegativity of spectral densities and to determine exact spectral sum rules, which can be employed to benchmark the accuracy of approximations to the exact Floquet many-body Green functions.