An absolutely stable open time crystal

Quntao Zhuang^†, Francisco Machado^†, Norman Y. Yao, Michael P. Zaletel
()
arXiv:2110.00585

Abstract

We show that locally-interacting, periodically-driven (Floquet) Hamiltonian dynamics coupled to a Langevin bath support finite-temperature discrete time crystals with an infinite auto-correlation time. The time crystalline order is stable to arbitrary perturbations, including those that break the time translation symmetry of the underlying drive. Our approach utilizes a general mapping from probabilistic cellular automata (PCA) to open classical Floquet systems. Applying this mapping to a variant of the Toom cellular automata, which we dub the ``π-Toom PCA’’, leads to a 2D Floquet Hamiltonian with a finite-temperature period-doubling phase transition. We provide numerical evidence for the existence of this transition, and analyze the statistics of the finite temperature fluctuations. Finally, we discuss how general results from the field of probabilistic cellular automata imply the existence of discrete time crystals in all dimensions, \(D\ge 1\).