Abstract
Periodically driven closed quantum many-body systems are known to exhibit prethermal or quasi-steady-state dynamics. In this work, we theoretically show that such prethermal phases can appear in the dynamics of a dipolar two-spin-1/2 system coupled to a heat bath if the cross terms between the drive and dipolar interactions are taken into consideration. To this end, we use our recently-reported fluctuation-regulated quantum master equation [A. Chakrabarti and R. Bhattacharyya, Phys. Rev. A 97, 063837 (2018)], to show that the predicted dynamics can successfully explain the experimentally observed features of the transient and prethermal regime.