New horizons for inhomogeneous quenches and Floquet CFT

Abstract

A fruitful avenue in investigating out-of-equilibrium quantum many-body systems is to abruptly change their Hamiltonian and study the subsequent evolution of their quantum state. If this is done once, the setup is called a quench, while if it is done periodically, it is called Floquet driving. We consider the solvable setup of a two-dimensional CFT driven by Hamiltonians built out of conformal symmetry generators: in this case, the quantum dynamics can be understood using two-dimensional geometry. We investigate how the dynamics is reflected in the holographic dual three-dimensional spacetime and find new horizons. We argue that bulk operators behind the new horizons are reconstructable by virtue of modular flow.