Stretched-exponential melting of a dynamically frozen state under imprinted phase noise in the ising chain in a transverse field

The concept of dynamical freezing is a phenomenon where a suitable set of local observables freezes under a strong periodic drive in a quantum many-body system. This happens because of the emergence of approximate but perpetual conservation laws when the drive is strong enough. In this work, we probe the resilience of dynamical freezing to random perturbations added to the relative phases between the interfering states (elements of a natural basis) in the time-evolving wave function after each drive cycle. We study this in an integrable Ising chain in a time-periodic transverse field. Our key finding is, that the imprinted phase noise melts the dynamically frozen state, but the decay is “slow”: a stretched-exponential decay rather than an exponential one. Stretched-exponential decays (also known as Kohlrausch relaxation) are usually expected in complex systems with time-scale hierarchies due to strong disorders or other inhomogeneities resulting in jamming, glassiness, or localization. Here we observe this in a simple translationally invariant system dynamically frozen under a periodic drive. Moreover, the melting here does not obliterate the entire memory of the initial state but leaves behind a steady remnant that depends on the initial conditions. This underscores the stability of dynamically frozen states. Graphical abstract