Floquet Prethermalization in a Bose-Hubbard System

The periodic driving of both classical and quantum systems can reveal new phenomena without an analog in non-driven systems. Nonetheless, periodically driven systems do not fulfill energy conservation, which means that many-body systems will absorb energy from the drive and, eventually, heat up to an arbitrarily high temperature, what is known as "heat death".

 
A way around this is to postpone the inevitable by driving the system at sufficiently high frequencies, which has been predicted to exponentially suppress the heating rates. In this experiment, done in collaboration with theorists from Stanford and Princeton University, we use our quantum-gas microscope to observe an such an exponential suppression of the heating in a cloud of ultracold bosons. Our results open the door to the creation of novel non-equilibrium phases of matter, and provide new understanding on the heating processes taking place in driven many-body system.

 
You can read the complete publication in PRX, and also the viewpoint article by Gregor Jotzu in  Physics.