Emergent Self-Similar Quantum Revivals in Spiral Drives

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] Emergent Self-Similar Quantum Revivals in Spiral Drives Xin-Chi Zhou, Liang-Hong Mo, Hongzheng Zhao, Bastien Lapierre We uncover a distinct form of nonequilibrium temporal order: self-similar quantum revivals in a many-body system driven by quasiperiodic spiral kicks, where the system recurrently returns close to its initial state at a hierarchically nested sequence of times. We demonstrate that both the fidelity and entanglement entropy exhibit this self-similar temporal structure. It originates from an emergent dynamical attractor, which we identify, such that all momentum modes eventually fall into the same closed orbits at self-similar times. We analytically justify this behavior and show that, for special momentum modes, this attractor arises as a consequence of a generalized spin echo process, and more generally we prove its existence using quasiperiodic SU(2) cocycles. Interestingly, the dynamics between consecutive revivals supports either volume- or area-law entanglement scaling, tunable via the driving parameters. In the presence of integrability-breaking perturbations, the system eventually heats up, but a long-lived prethermal regime with algebraically tunable lifetime occurs before heating sets in. Our results establish self-similar quantum revivals as a new paradigm for nonequilibrium quantum matter and provide a realistic route for its observation in current quantum simulators. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech); Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) Cite as: arXiv:2606.05288 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2606.05288v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05288 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Bastien Lapierre [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 18:00:04 UTC (3,151 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.stat-mech cond-mat.str-el 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?)