Universal transport in periodically driven systems without long-lived quasiparticles

Abstract

An intriguing regime of universal charge transport at high entropy density has been proposed for periodically driven interacting one-dimensional systems with Bloch bands separated by a large single-particle band gap. For weak interactions, a simple picture based on well-defined Floquet quasiparticles suggests that the system should host a quasisteady state current that depends only on the populations of the system's Floquet-Bloch bands and their associated quasienergy winding numbers. Here we show that such topological transport persists into the strongly interacting regime where the single-particle lifetime becomes shorter than the drive period. Analytically, we show that the value of the current is insensitive to interaction-induced band renormalizations and lifetime broadening when certain conditions are met by the system's non-equilibrium distribution function. We show that these conditions correspond to a quasisteady state. We support these predictions through numerical simulation of a system of strongly interacting fermions in a periodically-modulated chain of Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev dots. Our work establishes universal transport at high entropy density as a robust far from equilibrium topological phenomenon, which can be readily realized with cold atoms in optical lattices.