Stability of anomalous Floquet phases

In recent years, periodic driving has been studied intensively as a means to drive quantum systems into exotic topological phases. This process has led to discoveries of new, so-called anomalous phases, which can only exist in periodically driven systems. For example, with periodic driving, strong disorder can stabilize a phase with quantized orbital magnetization.

With interactions, periodic driving generally leads to an unbounded heating process, whose fixed point is a trivial infinite-temperature state that cannot support non-trivial topological phases. However, strong disorder has been proposed as a way to avoid the infinite-temperature fate, by preventing the system from thermalizing.

It remais an open question if disorder can stabilize anomalous Floquet phases beyond the non-interacting limit. In this talk, I will address this question through analytic arguments, and numerical simulations. The results presented here suggest (although not conclusively) that such phases can be stable.