Prethermalization in aperiodically kicked many-body dynamics

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 sequences with <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><a:mi>n</a:mi></a:math>-multipolar temporal correlations. We demonstrate that multiple heating channels can be eliminated . The number of eliminated channels increases with multipolar order <b:math xmlns:b="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><b:mi>n</b:mi></b:math>. 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 <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><c:msup><c:mi>t</c:mi><c:mo>*</c:mo></c:msup></c:math> can strongly depend on the temporal correlations of the drive, with a power-law dependence on the <d:math xmlns:d="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><d:mrow><d:msup><d:mi>t</d:mi><d:mo>*</d:mo></d:msup><d:mo>∼</d:mo><d:msup><d:mi>K</d:mi><d:mrow><d:mo>−</d:mo><d:mn>2</d:mn><d:mi>n</d:mi></d:mrow></d:msup></d:mrow></d:math>, for which we can account using a simple linearization argument. Published by the American Physical Society 2024