Dr. Alan Morningstar
Stanford University
Universality classes of thermalization for mesoscopic Floquet systems
Location: 1080 Physics Research Building, Smith Seminar Room
Faculty Host: Brian Skinner
Abstract: I’ll present recent work (arXiv:2210.13444) on the thermalization of periodically driven, isolated quantum many-body systems. It’s often assumed that these systems thermalize to a “featureless infinite-temperature” state, however, we identify several distinct phases of thermalization that can occur in such systems. These phases are representative of regimes of behavior in finite-size systems, but they are sharply defined in a particular large-system limit where the drive frequency scales up with system size as the large-size limit is taken. One consequence of our work is that certain experimentally observable quench protocols from simple initial states can show Floquet thermalization to a type of Schrodinger-cat state that is a superposition of states at distinct temperatures.
Bio:Alan Morningstar is a Bloch Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2022, and did undergraduate and master’s degrees in Canada at McMaster and the Perimeter Institute. His research is focused on quantum many-body dynamics and statistical physics, including the study of out-of-equilibrium phases and phase transitions in disordered, driven, or monitored systems.
