Defining a well-ordered Floquet basis by the average energy

Abstract

At the moment, the most efficient method to compute the state of a periodically driven quantum system is using Floquet theory and the Floquet eigenbasis. The wide application of this basis set method is limited by: a lack of unique ordering of the Floquet eigenfunctions, an ambiguity in their definition at resonance, and an instability against infinitesimal perturbation at resonance. We address these problems by redefining the eigenbasis using a revised definition of the average energy as a quantum number. As a result of this redefinition, we also obtain a Floquet-Ritz variational principle, and justify the truncation of the Hilbert space.