Observation of a discrete time crystal

By Jiehang Zhang, P. Hess, A. Kyprianidis, P. Becker, A. Lee, J. Smith, G. Pagano, Ionut-Dragos Potirniche, Andrew C. Potter, A. Vishwanath and 2 more. Nature, 2016

1,098 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a fundamental concept in many areas of physics, including cosmology, particle physics and condensed matter. An example is the breaking of spatial translational symmetry, which underlies the formation of crystals and the phase transition from liquid to solid. Using the analogy of crystals in space, the breaking of translational symmetry in time and the emergence of a ‘time crystal’ was recently proposed, but was later shown to be forbidden in thermal equilibrium. However, non-equilibrium Floquet systems, which are subject to a periodic drive, can exhibit persistent time correlations at an emergent subharmonic frequency. This new phase of matter has been dubbed a ‘discrete time crystal’. Here we present the experimental observation of a discrete time crystal, in an interacting spin chain of trapped atomic ions. We apply a periodic Hamiltonian to the system under many-body localization conditions, and observe a subharmonic temporal response that is robust to external perturbations. The observation of such a time crystal opens the door to the study of systems with long-range spatio-temporal correlations and novel phases of matter that emerge under intrinsically non-equilibrium conditions.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2a76866ae39cce8b719af0633c30c6782e6f3cfa

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

On scientific understanding with artificial intelligence (2022, background): “[32] Jiehang Zhang, PW Hess, A Kyprianidis, P Becker, A Lee, J Smith, G Pagano, I-D Potirniche, Andrew C Potter, A Vishwanath, et al.”
Odd-frequency superconductivity (2017, background): “We hope that this intriguing connection will be explored to see if there is is indeed one (Choi et al., 2017; Wilczek, 2012; Zhang et al., 2017).”
Colloquium : Many-body localization, thermalization, and entanglement (2018, background): “Different RG schemes were proposed to describe this process (Dumitrescu et al., 2017; Goremykina et al., 2018; Potter et al., 2015; Thiery et al., 2017; Vosk et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016).”
Quantum information processing with superconducting circuits: a review (2016, background): “Very recently discrete time translational symmetry breaking into a DTC has been observed experimentally in strongly driven spin systems, in an ion trap with 10 ions [544], and in an NV crystal with 106 disordered nuclear spins [545].”
An introduction to spontaneous symmetry breaking (2019, background): “Systems displaying this type of discrete time-crystalline order were reported in experimental setups of trapped ions driven by periodic laser pulses [126], as well as in diamond spin impurities driven by microwave radiation [127].”