Formation of cascading discrete time crystals with ultracold atoms
We study discrete time crystal (DTC) formation in a system driven periodically by an oscillating atomic mirror, consisting of two distinct ultracold atomic clouds in the presence of a gravitational field. The intra-species interactions are weak and attractive, while the inter-species interactions ar...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
IOP Publishing
2025-01-01
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| Series: | New Journal of Physics |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ade469 |
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| Summary: | We study discrete time crystal (DTC) formation in a system driven periodically by an oscillating atomic mirror, consisting of two distinct ultracold atomic clouds in the presence of a gravitational field. The intra-species interactions are weak and attractive, while the inter-species interactions are infinitely strong and repulsive. The clouds are arranged in a one-dimensional stack, where the bottom cloud bounces on an oscillating atomic mirror, which effectively acts as a driving force for the upper cloud due to the infinite inter-species repulsion. Using a Jastrow-like variational ansatz for the many-body wavefunction, we show numerically that sufficiently strong attractive intra-species interactions drive each subsystem to spontaneously break discrete time translation symmetry, resulting in the formation of a cascading DTC evolving with a period different than the driving period. Since the bottom cloud serves as the effective periodic driving for the upper cloud, this leads to a cascade of spontaneous symmetry breaking. With increasing intra-species interactions, we first observe a pronounced effect of spontaneous time translation symmetry breaking in the upper cloud, followed by a similar effect in the lower atomic cloud. |
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| ISSN: | 1367-2630 |