Homogeneous Floquet time crystal protected by gauge invariance

oleh: Angelo Russomanno, Simone Notarnicola, Federica Maria Surace, Rosario Fazio, Marcello Dalmonte, Markus Heyl

Format: Article
Diterbitkan: American Physical Society 2020-01-01

Deskripsi

We show that homogeneous lattice gauge theories can realize nonequilibrium quantum phases with long-range spatiotemporal order protected by gauge invariance instead of disorder. We study a kicked Z_{2}-Higgs gauge theory and find that it breaks the discrete temporal symmetry by a period doubling. In a limit solvable by Jordan-Wigner analysis we extensively study the time-crystal properties for large systems and further find that the spatiotemporal order is robust under the addition of a solvability-breaking perturbation preserving the Z_{2} gauge symmetry. The protecting mechanism for the nonequilibrium order relies on the Hilbert space structure of lattice gauge theories, so that our results can be directly extended to other models with discrete gauge symmetries.