Slow relaxation of quasi-periodically driven integrable quantum many-body systems

Abstract

We study the emergence and stability of a prethermal phase in an integrable many-body system subjected to a Fibonacci drive. Despite not being periodic, Fibonacci drives have been shown to introduce dynamical constraints due to their self-similar structure, unlike random driving protocols. From perturbative analysis, this has been argued to result in an exponentially long prethermal phase in the high frequency limit of driving. Examining higher order terms in the perturbative expansion, we show that the perturbative description breaks down eventually in such systems at a finite universal order, which depends solely on features of the Fibonacci sequence. This leads to an onset of energy absorption at long time scales for intermediate and low driving frequencies. Interestingly, in spite of the breakdown of an effective Hamiltonian in the perturbative analysis, we still observe slow logarithmic heating time-scales, unlike purely random drives.