Prethermalization in aperiodically kicked many-body dynamics

Abstract

Driven many-body systems typically experience heating due to the lack of energy conservation. Heating may be suppressed for time-periodic drives, but little is known for less regular drive protocols. In this paper, we investigate the heating dynamics in aperiodically kicked systems, specifically those driven by quasiperiodic Thue-Morse or a family of random sequences with n-multipolar temporal correlations. We demonstrate that multiple heating channels can be eliminated even away from the high-frequency regime. The number of eliminated channels increases with multipolar order n. We illustrate this in a classical kicked rotor chain where we find a long-lived prethermal regime. When the static Hamiltonian only involves the kinetic energy, the prethermal lifetime t∗ can strongly depend on the temporal correlations of the drive, with a power-law dependence on the kick strength t∗∼K-2n, for which we can account using a simple linearization argument.