Period-n Discrete Time Crystals and Quasicrystals with Ultracold Bosons.

Phys Rev Lett

Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0HE, United Kingdom.

Published: October 2019

We investigate the out-of-equilibrium properties of a system of interacting bosons in a ring lattice. We present a Floquet driving that induces clockwise (counterclockwise) circulation of the particles among the odd (even) sites of the ring which can be mapped to a fully connected model of clocks of two counterrotating species. The clocklike motion of the particles is at the core of a period-n discrete time crystal where L=2n is the number of lattice sites. In the presence of a "staircaselike" on-site potential, we report the emergence of a second characteristic timescale in addition to the period n-tupling. This new timescale depends on the microscopic parameters of the Hamiltonian and is incommensurate with the Floquet period, underpinning a dynamical phase we call "time quasicrystal." The rich dynamical phase diagram also features a thermal phase and an oscillatory phase, all of which we investigate and characterize. Our simple, yet rich model can be realized with state-of-the-art ultracold atoms experiments.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.150601DOI Listing

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