Photonic Floquet time crystals
Abstract
The public and scientists constantly have different perspectives. While on a time crystal, they stand in line and ask: What is a time crystal? Show me a material that is spontaneously crystalline in time? This study synthesizes a photonic material of Floquet time crystals and experimentally observes its indicative period-2T beating. We explicitly reconstruct a discrete time-crystalline ground state and reveal using an appropriately-designed photonic Floquet simulator the rigid period-doubling as a signature of the spontaneous breakage of the discrete time-translational symmetry. Unlike the result of the exquisite many-body interaction, the photonic time crystal is derived from a single-particle topological phase that can be extensively accessed by many pertinent nonequilibrium and periodically-driven platforms. Our observation will drive theoretical and technological interests toward condensed matter physics and topological photonics, and demystify time crystals for the non-scientific public.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2012.08217,
title = {Photonic Floquet time crystals},
author = {Bing Wang and Jiaqi Quan and Jianfei Han and Xiaopeng Shen and Hongwei Wu and Yiming Pan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.08217},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
39 pages, 5 figures, supplementary materials, 6 suppl. figures