Detecting prethermal Floquet phases of Rydberg atom arrays

Abstract: We study the prethermal Floquet phases of a two-dimensional (2D) Rydberg atom array on a rectangular lattice in the presence of a periodic drive with large drive amplitude. We derive an analytic, albeit perturbative, Floquet Hamiltonian using Floquet perturbation theory (FPT) which charts out these phases and shows that the transition between them can be accessed by tuning the drive frequency. Using both numerical exact diagonalization on finite-size arrays and analytical first-order Floquet Hamiltonian derived using FPT, we show that these prethermal Floquet phases and the transitions between them can be detected by studying the dynamics of equal-time density-density correlation functions of the Rydberg atoms. Our analysis thus provides a simple way of detecting these phases and associated transitions in this system; such a detection can be achieved in standard experiments which we discuss.