Signatures of fragmentation for periodically driven fermions

Abstract: We study the possible signatures of prethermal strong Hilbert space fragmentation (HSF) for one-dimensional (1D) fermions subjected to a periodic drive. We extend the results of Phys. Rev. Lett. 130, 120401 (2023) to show the possibility of such fragmentation for a large class of experimentally relevant drive protocols. Moreover, we demonstrate the persistence of HSF when the fermion chain is taken away from half-filling. Both these analysis indicate the robustness of the fragmentation phenomenon reported earlier. We also provide an alternate derivation of the Floquet Hamiltonian of the driven chain which yields insight into the generic nested commutator structure of its higher order terms. Finally, we study the density-density out-of-time-correlators (OTOC) of the driven chain both away and near the special drive frequencies at which its first order Floquet Hamiltonian exhibits fragmentation. We show that these OTOCs, for a chain with open boundary condition, exhibit a distinct periodic unscrambling of information at special drive frequencies; such unscrambling can therefore serve as a marker of prethermal HSF. We provide an approximate analytic explanation of the role of HSF behind such periodic unscrambling and discuss experiments which can detect signatures of strong HSF in such driven chains.