Staggered-Ladder Quasienergy Spectra for Generic Quasimomentum and Quantum-Dynamical Manifestations

Abstract: A new kind of regular quasienergy (Floquet) spectrum is found for the generalized kicked particle under quantum-resonance conditions at generic quasimomentum, a quantity most relevant in atom-optics experimental realizations of kicked-rotor systems. The new non-Poisson regular spectrum has the structure of a staggered ladder, i.e., it is the superposition of a finite number of ladder subspectra all having the same spacing, which is independent of the nonintegrability of the system. This spectral structure is shown to have distinct quantum-dynamical manifestations: A suppression of quantum resonances and a novel type of dynamical localization characterized by unique features such as traveling-wave components in the time evolution. These phenomena are found to be robust under small variations of the quasimomentum and should therefore be experimentally observable using Bose-Einstein condensates with sufficiently small quasimomentum width.