Self-organized photonic time quasicrystal from a single imposed clock
Abstract
A photonic time crystal usually writes a clock into a medium. Here one clock does more than program the medium: it seeds a quasiperiodic temporal order that the nonlinear medium selects for itself. In a guided-wave lattice of nonlinear dipoles, a single-tone pump modulates the polarization sector, while Maxwell--polarization back-action selects two response frequencies whose only resolved low-order relation is the pump-locked sum condition. Their sum phase locks to the pump and the complementary phase winds, producing a photonic discrete time quasicrystal with torus-like phase dynamics and a discrete combination spectrum. Site-resolved measurements show locked-phase coherence across the measured lattice sites over a finite control-parameter window. These results establish a route from externally programmed time-varying media to self-organized temporal order in nonlinear photonic systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.05649,
title = {Self-organized photonic time quasicrystal from a single imposed clock},
author = {Minwook Kyung and Kyungmin Lee and Yung Kim and Eun-Gook Moon and Joonhee Choi and Bumki Min},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.05649},
year = {2026}
}