Abstract
While driven interacting quantum matter is generically subject to heating and scrambling, certain classes of systems evade this paradigm. We study such an exceptional class in periodically driven critical -dimensional systems with a spatially modulated but disorder-free time evolution operator. Instead of complete scrambling, the excitations of the system remain well defined. Their propagation is analogous to the evolution along light cones in a curved spacetime obtained by two black holes. The Hawking temperature serves as an order parameter which distinguishes between heating and nonheating phases. Beyond a timescale determined by the inverse Hawking temperature, excitations are absorbed by the black holes resulting in a singular concentration of energy at their horizon. We obtain these results analytically within conformal field theory, capitalizing on a mapping to sine-squared deformed field theories. Furthermore, by means of numerical calculations for an interacting spin- chain, we demonstrate that our findings survive lattice regularization.
- Received 25 September 2019
- Revised 19 February 2020
- Accepted 1 April 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.023085
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Published by the American Physical Society