Pre-Floquet states facilitating coherent subharmonic response of periodically driven many-body systems

We demonstrate longtime coherent subharmonic motion of a many-boson system subjected to an external time-periodic driving force. The underlying mechanism is exemplified numerically through analysis of a periodically driven Bose-Hubbard dimer, and clarified conceptually by semiclassical requantization of invariant tubes pertaining to the system’s mean-field description. In this way, one arrives at pre-Floquet states that relate to the actual many-body Floquet states in a manner similar to the relation of site-localized Wannier states to lattice-extended Bloch states in solid-state physics. It is argued that even high-order subharmonic response can be systematically engineered, and be observed experimentally, with weakly interacting Floquet condensates comprising a sufficiently large number of particles.