Asymptotic Floquet states of open quantum systems: the role of interaction

When a periodically modulated many-body quantum system is weakly coupled to an environment, the combined action of these temporal modulations and dissipation steers the system towards a state characterized by a time-periodic density operator. To resolve this asymptotic non-equilibrium state at stroboscopic instants of time, we use the dissipative propagator over one period of modulations, ‘Floquet map’, and evaluate the stroboscopic density operator as its invariant. Particle interactions control properties of the map and thus the features of its invariant. In addition, the spectrum of the map provides insight into the system relaxation towards the asymptotic state and may help to understand whether it is possible (or not) to construct a stroboscopic time-independent Lindblad generator which mimics the action of the original time-dependent one. We illustrate the idea with a scalable many-body model, a periodically modulated Bose–Hubbard dimer. We contrast the relations between the interaction-induced bifurcations in a mean-field description with the numerically exact stroboscopic evolution and discuss the characteristics of the genuine quantum many-body state vs the characteristics of its mean-field counterpart.