English

Time-crystalline long-range order in squeezed ground state

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2021-10-26 v4 Quantum Gases Statistical Mechanics Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

It is widely believed that ground-state time crystals are not realizable in realistic macroscopic systems. In particular, Watanabe and Oshikawa proved a theorem that implies the absence of the time-dependent long-range order (TDLRO) in the ground states of short-range many-body systems. However, this theorem does not forbid the presence of the ground-state TDLRO for macroscopic quantities. In this work, we investigate a simple bosonic model with a squeezed ground state and point out that the time-dependence of the ground-state TDLRO for the number operator is proportional to the square of the average number in the infinite-squeezing limit, or equivalently, the infinite average-number limit. This result implies the presence of the TDLRO for macroscopic boson number. We also discuss the physical implementations in optical, spin, and tight-binding systems, including the variants. We find an example with the macroscopic TDLRO whose essence is low-lying-state physics and another with marginalmarginal TDLRO at the quantum critical point. In addition, we reconsider the definition of the ground-state time crystal in terms of the Floquet picture.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.06194,
  title  = {Time-crystalline long-range order in squeezed ground state},
  author = {Nobuyuki Okuma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.06194},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

10 pages, 4 figures, implementation for a tight-binding model is discussed in SM

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:50:05.849Z