Floquet analysis of a fractal-spectrum-generating periodically driven quantum system

Abstract

We employ Floquet analysis to study the spectral properties of a double-kicked top (DKT) system. This is a classically nonintegrable dynamical system, which also shows chaos. However, even for the underlying classically chaotic dynamics, the quantum quasienergy spectrum of this system does not follow the random matrix conjecture which was proposed for the quantum spectrum of any classically chaotic systems. Instead the quasienergy spectrum of the DKT system shows a butterfly-like self-similar fractal spectrum. Here we investigate the relation between the quasienergy spectrum and the energy spectrum of the corresponding time-independent Floquet Hamiltonian. This Hamiltonian is determined by factorizing the Floquet time-evolution operator into three terms: an initial kick and a final kick, and in between a time-independent evolution dictated by a time-independent Hermitian operator which is called the Floquet Hamiltonian. Like any other generic systems, the Floquet Hamiltonian of the DKT system is also not possible to determine exactly. We apply a recently proposed perturbation theory to obtain the approximate Floquet Hamiltonian at the high-frequency driving limit. We then study the parameter regime where the quasienergy spectrum of the Floquet time-evolution operator matches the energy spectrum of the approximate Floquet Hamiltonian. We have also done a comparative analysis of how the two butterfly spectra disappear with the variation of a system parameter. Finally, we also explore the self-similar property of the energy spectrum of the approximate Floquet Hamiltonian and find its connection with the Farey sequence. Unlike all previous studies, here we have extensively investigated the self-similar property of the whole DKT butterfly.