Prethermal time crystals in a one-dimensional periodically driven Floquet system

Abstract

Motivated by experimental observations of time-symmetry breaking behavior in a periodically driven (Floquet) system, we study a one-dimensional spin model to explore the stability of such Floquet discrete time crystals (DTCs) under the interplay between interaction and the microwave driving. For intermediate interactions and high drivings, from the time evolution of both stroboscopic spin polarization and mutual information between two ends, we show that Floquet DTCs can exist in a prethermal time regime without the tuning of strong disorder. For much weak interactions the system is a symmetry-unbroken phase, while for strong interactions it gives its way to a thermal phase. Through analyzing the entanglement dynamics, we show that large driving fields protect the prethermal DTCs from many-body localization and thermalization. Our results suggest that by increasing the spin interaction, one can drive the experimental system into optimal regime for observing a robust prethermal DTC phase.

8 pages, 9 figures; published version

References in corpus (6)

• Many-body localization edge in the random-field Heisenberg chain
• Many-body localization in periodically driven systems
• Absence of Quantum Time Crystals
• Periodically driven ergodic and many-body localized quantum systems
• Operator entanglement entropy of the time evolution operator in chaotic systems
• Matrix Product State applications for the ALPS project

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Discrete Time-Crystalline Order in Cavity and Circuit QED Systems
• Chimera Time-Crystalline order in quantum spin networks
• Lack of a genuine time crystal in a chiral soliton model