Heating rates in periodically driven strongly interacting quantum many-body systems*

We study heating rates in strongly interacting quantum lattice systems in the thermodynamic limit. Using a numerical linked cluster expansion, we calculate the energy as a function of the driving time and find a robust exponential regime. The heating rates are shown to be in excellent agreement with Fermi's golden rule. We discuss the relationship between heating rates and, within the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, the smooth function that characterizes the off-diagonal matrix elements of the drive operator in the eigenbasis of the static Hamiltonian. We show that such a function, in nonintegrable and (remarkably) integrable Hamiltonians, can be probed experimentally by studying heating rates as functions of the drive frequency.