Stroboscopic prethermalization in weakly interacting periodically driven systems.

Time-periodic driving provides a promising route toward engineering nontrivial states in quantum many-body systems. However, while it has been shown that the dynamics of integrable, noninteracting systems can synchronize with the driving into a nontrivial periodic motion, generic nonintegrable systems are expected to heat up until they display a trivial infinite-temperature behavior. In this paper we show that a quasiperiodic time evolution over many periods can also emerge in weakly interacting systems, with a clear separation of the timescales for synchronization and the eventual approach of the infinite-temperature state.

First-order dynamical phase transitions.

Recently, dynamical phase transitions have been identified based on the nonanalytic behavior of the Loschmidt echo in the thermodynamic limit [Heyl et al., Phys. Rev.