Conformal Floquet dynamics with a continuous drive protocol

Abstract

Abstract We study the properties of a conformal field theory (CFT) driven periodically with a continuous protocol characterized by a frequency ωD. Such a drive, in contrast to its discrete counterparts (such as square pulses or periodic kicks), does not admit exact analytical solution for the evolution operator U. In this work, we develop a Floquet perturbation theory which provides an analytic, albeit perturbative, result for U that matches exact numerics in the large drive amplitude limit. We find that the drive yields the well-known heating (hyperbolic) and non-heating (elliptic) phases separated by transition lines (parabolic phase boundary). Using this and starting from a primary state of the CFT, we compute the return probability (Pn), equal (Cn) and unequal (Gn) time two-point primary correlators, energy density(En), and the mth Renyi entropy ($$ {S}_n^m $$ S n m ) after n drive cycles. Our results show that below a crossover stroboscopic time scale nc, Pn, En and Gn exhibits universal power law behavior as the transition is approached either from the heating or the non-heating phase; this crossover scale diverges at the transition. We also study the emergent spatial structure of Cn, Gn and En for the continuous protocol and find emergence of spatial divergences of Cn and Gn in both the heating and non-heating phases. We express our results for $$ {S}_n^m $$ S n m and Cn in terms of conformal blocks and provide analytic expressions for these quantities in several limiting cases. Finally we relate our results to those obtained from exact numerics of a driven lattice model.