Emergent Self-Similar Quantum Revivals in Spiral Drives

Abstract

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.