Related papers: A colloidal time crystal and its tempomechanical p…
Time crystals are nonequilibrium phases of matter characterized by the emergence of temporal ordering, in which an interacting many-body system develops robust structure in its time evolution that is not trivially dictated by the external…
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…
Continuous time-translation symmetry is often spontaneously broken in open quantum systems, and the condition for their emergence has been actively investigated. However, there are only a few cases in which its condition for appearance has…
Time crystals are quantum systems which are able to reveal condensed matter behavior in the time domain. It is known that crystalization in time can be observed in a periodically driven many-body system when interactions between particles…
We report the observation of a symmetry-protected topological time crystal, which is implemented with an array of programmable superconducting qubits. Unlike the time crystals reported in previous experiments, where spontaneous breaking of…
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…
Time crystals are many-body states that spontaneously break translation symmetry in time the way that ordinary crystals do in space. While experimental observations have confirmed the existence of discrete or continuous time crystals, these…
We show that an ultra-cold atomic cloud bouncing on an oscillating mirror can reveal spontaneous breaking of a discrete time translation symmetry. In many-body simulations we illustrate the process of the symmetry breaking that can be…
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.
Experimental advances have allowed for the exploration of nearly isolated quantum many-body systems whose coupling to an external bath is very weak. A particularly interesting class of such systems is those which do not thermalize under…
We simulate the dynamics of paramagnetic colloidal particles that are placed above a magnetic hexagonal pattern and exposed to an external field periodically changing its direction along a control loop. The conformation of three colloidal…
Time crystals are time-periodic self-organized structures postulated by Frank Wilczek in 2012. While the original concept was strongly criticized, it stimulated at the same time an intensive research leading to propositions and experimental…
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…
Open many-body quantum systems can exhibit intriguing nonequilibrium phases of matter, such as time crystals. In these phases, the state of the system spontaneously breaks the time-translation symmetry of the dynamical generator, which…
Quantum time crystals are systems characterised by spontaneously emerging periodic order in the time domain. A range of such phases has been reported. The concept has even been discussed in popular literature, and deservedly so: while the…
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…
Spontaneous symmetry breaking and elementary excitation are two of the pillars of condensed matter physics that are closely related to each other. The symmetry and its spontaneous breaking not only control the dynamics and spectrum of…
The aim of this paper is to propose a criterion of spontaneous symmetry breaking that makes reference to the properties of pure phases defined by a translationally invariant state. By avoiding any reference to the ground state, at the basis…
We focus on a Hamiltonian system with a continuous symmetry, and dynamics that takes place on a presymplectic manifold. We explain how the symmetry can become spontaneously broken by a time crystal, that we define as the minimum of the…
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…