Recurrence in a periodically driven and weakly damped Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou chain

Abstract

We report numerical evidence of Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT)-like recurrence in weakly damped, periodically driven alpha-FPUT chains. In narrow regions of driving amplitude and damping, the steady-state energy is exchanged among a few low-frequency modes in a quasi-periodic (or highly regular, near-periodic) manner over long timescales. The maximum damping allowing recurrence decreases rapidly with chain length, suggesting that in the thermodynamic limit such behavior is unlikely to persist. Unlike discrete time crystals, the recurrence period is not an integer multiple of the driving period and does not correspond to spontaneous symmetry breaking. Nevertheless, these results reveal a new type of coherent nonlinear dynamics in driven, open multimode systems and provide guidance for experimentally realizing long-lived quasi-periodic states.