Classification of the Floquet statistical distribution for time-periodic open systems

Abstract

How to understand the order of Floquet stationary states in the presence of external bath coupling and their statistical mechanics is challenging; the answers are important for preparations and control of those Floquet states. Here, we propose a scheme to classify the statistical distribution of Floquet states for time-periodic systems which couple to an external heat bath. If an effective Hamiltonian and a system-bath coupling operator, which are all time-independent, can be simultaneously obtained via a time-periodic unitary transformation, the statistical mechanics of the Floquet states is equivalent to the equilibrium statistical mechanics of the effective Hamiltonian. In the large driving frequency cases, we also show that the conditions of this theorem can be weakened to: the time-period part in the system Hamiltonian commutes with the system-bath coupling operator. A Floquet-Markov approach is applied to numerically compute the Floquet state occupation distribution of a bosonic chain, and the results agree with the theoretical predictions.