Steady state of interacting Floquet insulators

Abstract

Floquet engineering offers tantalizing opportunities for controlling the dynamics of quantum many-body systems and realizing new nonequilibrium phases of matter. However, this approach faces a major challenge: generic interacting Floquet systems absorb energy from the drive, leading to uncontrolled heating which washes away the sought-after behavior. How to achieve and control a nontrivial nonequilibrium steady state is therefore of crucial importance. In this work, we study the dynamics of an interacting one-dimensional periodically driven electronic system coupled to a phonon heat bath. Using the Floquet-Boltzmann equation (FBE) we show that the electronic populations of the Floquet eigenstates can be controlled by the dissipation. We find the regime in which the steady state features an insulator-like filling of the Floquet bands, with a low density of additional excitations. Furthermore, we develop a simple rate equation model for the steady state excitation density that captures the behavior obtained from the numerical solution of the FBE over a wide range of parameters.