Breakdown of Disorder-Suppressed Floquet Heating under Two-Frequency Driving

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 3 Apr 2026] Breakdown of Disorder-Suppressed Floquet Heating under Two-Frequency Driving Cooper M. Selco, Christian Bengs, Chaitali Shah, Ashok Ajoy Periodic (Floquet) driving enables Hamiltonian engineering and nonequilibrium phases, but interacting systems eventually heat by absorbing energy from the drive. Disorder can greatly delay this process, yielding long-lived prethermal plateaus. Here we show that this protection can fail when pulse-train control introduces a second driving frequency and when the disorder fluctuates. Using a natural-abundance 13C nuclear-spin network in diamond, we observe sharp peaks in the late-time heating rate at the double- and triple-spin-flip resonance conditions predicted by bimodal Floquet interference, and track their evolution with drive frequency. A switching-noise model attributes the resonant absorption to stochastic electron-spin dynamics that intermittently tune rare nuclear clusters into multi-photon resonance. Our results reveal a resonance-activated limit for disorder-stabilized Floquet phases and suggest new routes to DC-field quantum sensing based on an abrupt breakdown of prethermalization. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) Cite as: arXiv:2604.03494 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.03494v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.03494 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Cooper Selco Mr. [view email] [v1] Fri, 3 Apr 2026 22:39:36 UTC (2,085 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.mes-hall References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)