Formation and suppression of nonthermal statistics in peridically driven quantum Ising models

Abstract

In classic statistical physics, an isolated system corresponds to a constant energy shell in the phase space, which can be described by the microcanonical ensemble. While, for an isolated quantum system, the conventional treatment is to subject the system to a narrow energy window in the Hilbert space instead of the energy shell in classical phase space, and then confine the participating eigen states of system wave function in the narrow window, so that the microcanonical ensemble can be recovered in the framework of quantum mechanics. Apart from the traditional theory, there is a more self-consistent description for the isolated quantum system, that is, the quantum microcanonical (QMC) ensemble. The QMC ensemble abandons the narrow energy window assumption, and allows all the eigen states to contribute to the system wave function on condition that the system average energy is fixed at a given value. At the same time, the total occupation probability of these eigen states is conserved to unity. The most probable probability distribution obtained in the Hilbert space for an isolated quantum system according to the constraints specified above is called the QMC statistics. There is a clear difference between the QMC distribution and the traditional Gibbs distribution having an exponential form. Through the external periodic drives, an isolated quantum system may produce the QMC distribution, which is a consequence of the interplay between internal origins and external drives. In this paper, we investigate the conditions for the formation and suppression of QMC distribution by using the exact diagonalization method based on the one-dimensional Ising model. We start with the one-dimensional Ising model and focus on three different cases of periodic drives: systems under vertical (along the <i>z</i> axis), horizontal (along the <i>x</i> axis), horizontal magnetic field together with random internal (along the <i>y</i> axis) magnetic field. For all these three cases, the external magnetic fields are set to be ordinary rectangular pulses and the Gibbs distributions are taken as the initial states. We then study the evolutions and their asymptotic tendencies to the QMC distributions of the eigen state occupation probability under the effect of external periodic magnetic field. The results show that under the vertical magnetic field, the eigen state occupation probability does not change, and the system cannot produce the QMC distribution; under the horizontal magnetic field, the system tends to display a QMC distribution, but only partly; under horizontal and random internal magnetic fields at the same time, the transition to QMC distribution can be fully realized, and finally the system is almost completely thermalized. In order to clarify the different behaviors of the Ising model in the three cases, we also calculate the information entropy of the eigen state of Floquet operator in the eigen representation of the unperturbed Hamiltonian. We find that as the information entropy of the Floquet eigen state increases, the convergence to the QMC distribution in the Hilbert space is improved. We also notice that the mechanism for the emergence of QMC distribution is closely related to the thermalization effect of the isolated quantum system. Our analyses show that when the magnetic field is vertical, it cannot trigger the thermalization of the system. When the magnetic field is horizontal, the system becomes partly, but not completely, thermalized. When we add a horizontal periodic magnetic field and a random internal magnetic field at the same time, the system can be completely thermalized to infinite temperature. Thus, the asymptotic behavior towards the QMC statistics is a reflection of the fact that the isolated quantum system is thermalizable under periodic drives.