  As many-body Floquet theory becomes more popular, it is important to find
ways to connect theory with experiment. Theoretical calculations can have a
periodic driving field that is always on, but experiment cannot. Hence, we need
to know how long a driving field is needed before the system starts to look
like the periodically driven Floquet system. We answer this question here for
noninteracting band electrons in the infinite-dimensional limit by studying the
properties of the system under pulsed driving fields and illustrating how they
approach the Floquet limit. Our focus is on determining the minimal pulse
lengths needed to recover the qualitative and semiquantitative Floquet theory
results.
