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Pre-Floquet states facilitating coherent subharmonic response of periodically driven many-body systems

Steffen Seligmann, Hamed Koochaki Kelardeh, and Martin Holthaus

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 043013 – Published 2 October, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/vgpm-s6tv

Abstract

We demonstrate longtime coherent subharmonic motion of a many-boson system subjected to an external time-periodic driving force. The underlying mechanism is exemplified numerically through analysis of a periodically driven Bose-Hubbard dimer, and clarified conceptually by semiclassical requantization of invariant tubes pertaining to the system’s mean-field description. In this way, one arrives at pre-Floquet states that relate to the actual many-body Floquet states in a manner similar to the relation of site-localized Wannier states to lattice-extended Bloch states in solid-state physics. It is argued that even high-order subharmonic response can be systematically engineered, and be observed experimentally, with weakly interacting Floquet condensates comprising a sufficiently large number of particles.

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 043013– Published 2 October, 2025
  • Received 9 April 2025
  • Accepted 4 September 2025
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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.

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