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Dynamical Phases of Higher Dimensional Floquet CFTs

by Diptarka Das, Sumit R. Das, Arnab Kundu, and Krishnendu Sengupta

Submission summary

Abstract

This paper investigates the dynamical phases of Floquet Conformal Field Theories (CFTs) in space-time dimensions greater than two. Building upon our previous work which introduced quaternionic representations for studying Floquet dynamics in higher-dimensional CFTs, we now explore more general square pulse drive protocols that go beyond a single SU(1, 1) subgroup. We demonstrate that, for multi-step drive protocols, the system exhibits distinct dynamical phases characterized by the nature of the eigenvalues of the quaternionic matrix representing time evolution in a single cycle, leading to different stroboscopic responses. Our analysis establishes a fundamental geometric interpretation where these dynamical phases directly correspond to the presence or absence of Killing horizons in the base space of the CFT and in a higher dimensional AdS space on which a putative dual lives. The heating phase is associated with a non-extremal horizon, the critical phase with an extremal horizon which disappears in the non-heating phase. We develop perturbative approaches to compute the Floquet Hamiltonians in different regimes and show, how tuning drive parameters can lead to horizons, providing a geometric framework for understanding heating phenomena in driven conformal systems.

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