Periodically driven model with quasiperiodic potential and staggered hopping amplitudes: engineering of mobility gaps and multifractal states

Abstract: We study if periodic driving of a model with a quasiperiodic potential can generate interesting Floquet phases which have no counterparts in the static model. Specifically, we consider the Aubry-Andr\'e model which is a one-dimensional time-independent model with an on-site quasiperiodic potential $V_0$ and a nearest-neighbor hopping amplitude which is taken to have a staggered form. We add a uniform hopping amplitude which varies periodically in time with a frequency $\omega$. Unlike the static Aubry-Andr\'e model which has a simple phase diagram with only two phases (only extended or only localized states), we find that the driven model has four possible phases: a phase with only extended states, a phase with multiple mobility gaps separating different quasienergy bands, a mixed phase with coexisting extended, multifractal, and localized states, and a phase with only localized states. The multifractal states have generalized inverse participation ratios which scale with the system size with exponents which are different from the values for both extended and localized states. In addition, we observe intricate re-entrant transitions between the different kinds of states when $\omega$ and $V_0$ are varied. In the limit of high frequency and large driving amplitude, we find that the Floquet quasienergies match the energies of the undriven system, but the Floquet eigenstates are much more extended. We also study the spreading of a one-particle wave packet and find that it is always ballistic but the ballistic velocity varies significantly with the system parameters, sometimes showing a non-monotonic dependence on $V_0$ which does not occur in the static model. We conclude that the interplay of quasiperiodic potential and driving produces a rich phase diagram which does not appear in the static model.