Breakdown of Disorder-Suppressed Floquet Heating under Two-Frequency Driving
Abstract
Periodic (Floquet) driving enables Hamiltonian engineering and nonequilibrium phases, but interacting systems eventually heat by absorbing energy from the drive. Disorder can greatly delay this process, yielding long-lived prethermal plateaus. Here, we show that this protection can fail when pulse-train control introduces a second driving frequency and when the disorder fluctuates. Using a natural-abundance ^{13}C nuclear-spin network in diamond, we observe sharp peaks in the late-time heating rate at the double- and triple-spin-flip resonance conditions predicted by bimodal Floquet interference and track their evolution with drive frequency. A switching-noise model attributes the resonant absorption to stochastic electron-spin dynamics that intermittently tune rare nuclear clusters into multiphoton resonance. Our results reveal a resonance-activated limit for disorder-stabilized Floquet phases and suggest new routes to dc-field quantum sensing based on an abrupt breakdown of prethermalization.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Fluid Dynamics and Thin Films
Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer
Heat Transfer and Boiling Studies
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Physical Review Letters
- Publisher
- American Physical Society (APS)
- Volume
- 136
- Issue
- 22
- Pages
- 220801–220801
- Publication date
- 12 May 2026
- Language
- EN