Controlling dynamical many-body freezing via local driving

Dynamics of periodically driven, interacting quantum systems can exhibit slow thermalization and freezing

of certain initial states, in analogy with quantum scars. In this work, we show that under the influence of local

driving the phenomena of dynamical many-body freezing can be destabilized for a staggered Heisenberg spin-

1/2 chain in a uniform magnetic field. For the boundary-driven system, a fully polarized initial state crosses

over to slow thermalization, avoiding the phenomena of freezing. We show the origins of the instability using

analytic higher-order perturbative expansion of the Floquet Hamiltonian which is corroborated by numerical

exact diagonalization. Furthermore, by employing a multi-site driving protocol the freezing of the boundary

site can be restored giving rise to a rich entanglement structure. We develop a coherent picture of slow, local

thermalization and freezing under strong local driving for a broad class of interacting spin chains.