English
Related papers

Related papers: Time crystals in periodically driven systems

200 papers

Time crystals appear when systems display a commensurate spontaneous breaking of the discrete time translational invariance imposed by an external periodic drive. No consensus on the definition has been reached as yet, but important aspects…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-01-18 Robin Schäfer , Götz S. Uhrig , Joachim Stolze

The spontaneous breaking of symmetries is a widespread phenomenon in physics. When time translational symmetry is spontaneously broken, an exotic nonequilibrium state of matter in which the same structures repeat themselves in time can…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-12-10 Marina Evers , Raphael Wittkowski

Time crystals are many-body systems whose ground state spontaneously breaks time-translation symmetry and thus exhibits long-range spatiotemporal order and robust periodic motion. Using hydrodynamics, we have recently shown how an…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-12-15 R. Hurtado-Gutiérrez , C. Pérez-Espigares , P. I. Hurtado

Time crystals, a unique non-equilibrium quantum phenomenon with promising applications in current quantum technologies, mark a significant advance in quantum mechanics. Although traditionally studied in atom-cavity and optical lattice…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-07 Subhajit Sarkar , Yonatan Dubi

The notion of spontaneous symmetry breaking has been well established to characterize classical and quantum phase transitions of matter, such as in condensation, crystallization or quantum magnetism. Generalizations of this paradigm to the…

Time crystals are proposed states of matter which spontaneously break time translation symmetry. There is no settled definition of such states. We offer a new definition which follows the traditional recipe for Wigner symmetries and order…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-09-27 Vedika Khemani , C. W. von Keyserlingk , S. L. Sondhi

In analogy with crystalline solids around us, Wilczek recently proposed the idea of "time crystals" as phases that spontaneously break the continuous time translation into a discrete subgroup. The proposal stimulated further studies and…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-06-26 Haruki Watanabe , Masaki Oshikawa

Understanding how temporal order degrades in quantum systems remains a central issue in nonequilibrium physics. Here we study the melting of discrete time crystals in a periodically driven holographic system, where a distinct (discrete)…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2026-04-16 Yu-Qi Lei , Xian-Hui Ge , Yu Tian , Shao-Feng Wu

Between space crystals and amorphous materials there exists a third class of aperiodic structures which lack translational symmetry but reveal long-range order. They are dubbed quasi-crystals and their formation, similarly as the formation…

Quantum Gases · Physics 2019-06-19 Krzysztof Giergiel , Arkadiusz Kuroś , Krzysztof Sacha

Time crystals form when arbitrary physical states of a periodically driven system spontaneously break discrete time-translation symmetry. We introduce one-dimensional time-crystalline topological superconductors, for which time-translation…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2020-03-11 Aaron Chew , David F. Mross , Jason Alicea

Discrete time crystals are a special phase of matter in which time translational symmetry is broken through a periodic driving pulse. Here, we first propose and characterize an effective mechanism to generate a stable discrete time crystal…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-03-31 Rozhin Yousefjani , Krzysztof Sacha , Abolfazl Bayat

Difficulties around the idea of spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry in a closed quantum mechanical system are identified, and then overcome in a simple model. The possibility of ordering in imaginary time is also discussed.

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-06-04 Frank Wilczek

We argue that time crystal properties naturally arise from phase-space noncommutative quantum mechanics. In order to exemplify our point we consider the 2-dimensional noncommutative quantum harmonic oscillator and show that it exibihits…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-02-29 Orfeu Bertolami , A. E. Bernardini

Continuous time crystals, i.e., nonequilibrium phases with a spontaneously broken continuous time-translational symmetry, have been studied and recently observed in the long-time dynamics of open quantum systems. Here, we investigate a…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-09-15 Felix Russo , Thomas Pohl

The formation of a phase of matter can be associated with the spontaneous breaking of a symmetry. For crystallization, this broken symmetry is the spatial translation symmetry, as the atoms spontaneously localize in a periodic fashion. In…

Discrete time crystals are periodically driven systems that display spontaneous symmetry breaking of time translation invariance in the form of indefinite subharmonic oscillations. We introduce a thermodynamically consistent model for a…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-01-20 Lukas Oberreiter , Udo Seifert , Andre C. Barato

We define what it means for time translation symmetry to be spontaneously broken in a quantum system, and show with analytical arguments and numerical simulations that this occurs in a large class of many-body-localized driven systems with…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2016-08-31 Dominic V. Else , Bela Bauer , Chetan Nayak

Time crystals are a nonequilibrium phase of matter that extend fundamental spontaneous symmetry breaking into the temporal dimension, typically requiring external driving for their realization. Here, we explore the nonequilibrium phase…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-13 Shu Yang , Zeqing Wang , Libin Fu , Jianwen Jie

A discrete time crystal is a phase unique to nonequilibrium systems, where discrete time translation symmetry is spontaneously broken. Most of conventional time crystals proposed so far rely on spontaneous breaking of on-site symmetries and…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2018-08-30 Kaoru Mizuta , Kazuaki Takasan , Masaya Nakagawa , Norio Kawakami

Periodically driven quantum systems host a range of non-equilibrium phenomena which are unrealizable at equilibrium. Discrete time-translational symmetry in a periodically driven many-body system can be spontaneously broken to form a…

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics · Physics 2019-06-11 James O'Sullivan , Oliver Lunt , Christoph W. Zollitsch , M. L. W. Thewalt , John J. L. Morton , Arijeet Pal