Title: Floquet Superheating

Speaker:  Prof. Hongzheng Zhao, Peking University

Time: 14:00 pm, June 11 (Thursday), 2026

Place: Room M830,IOP-CAS(中国科学院物理究所M830)

Abstract

Periodically driven many-body systems generally heat towards a featureless"infinite-temperature" state. As an alternative to uniform heating in a cleansystem, here we establish a Floquet superheating regime, where fast heatingnucleates at "hot spots" generated by rare fluctuations in the local energywith respect to an appropriate effective Hamiltonian. Striking macroscopicconsequences include exceptionally long-lived prethermalization and non-ergodic bimodal distributions of macroscopic observables. Superheating ispredicated on a heating rate depending strongly on the local fluctuation; inour example, this is supplied by a sharp state-selective spin-echo, where theenergy absorption is strongly suppressed for low-energy states, whilethermal fluctuations open up excessive heating channels. A simplephenomenological theory is developed to show the existence of a criticaldroplet size, which incorporates heating by the driving field as well as theheat current out of the droplet. Our results shine light on a new heatingmechanism and suggest new routes towards stabilizing non-equilibriumphases of matter in driven systems.
 

Reference: arXiv:2511.12877

About the speaker
Dr. Hongzheng Zhao is an Assistant Professor at Peking University. Hereceived his bachelor's degree from Shandong University in 2017 and hisPh.D. from Imperial College London in 2021. After a postdoctoral positionat the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, he joinedPeking University in 2023. His research focuses on nonequilibrium many-body dynamics, including quantum thermalization, driven systems, stronglycorrelated systems, quantum simulation, and quantum computation.