Discrete time crystal enabled by Stark many-body localization

TL;DR

This paper introduces a disorder-free periodically driven model exhibiting a discrete time crystal phase stabilized by Stark many-body localization, demonstrated through analytical and numerical methods, with potential for NISQ hardware realization.

Contribution

It presents a novel disorder-free DTC model stabilized by Stark MBL, expanding understanding and experimental possibilities of time crystals without disorder averaging.

Findings

DTC phase confirmed via analytical and numerical evidence

Robust subharmonic and beating oscillations observed

Model suitable for implementation on NISQ quantum hardware

Abstract

Discrete time crystal (DTC) has recently attracted increasing attention, but most DTC models and their properties are only revealed after disorder average. In this Letter, we propose a simple disorder-free periodically driven model that exhibits nontrivial DTC order stabilized by Stark many-body localization (MBL). We demonstrate the existence of DTC phase by analytical analysis from perturbation theory and convincing numerical evidence from observable dynamics. The new DTC model paves a new promising way for further experiments and deepens our understanding of DTC. Since the DTC order doesn't require special quantum state preparation and the strong disorder average, it can be naturally realized on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware with much fewer resources and repetitions. Moreover, besides the robust subharmonic response, there are other novel robust beating oscillations in Stark-MBL DTC phase which are absent in random or quasi-periodic MBL DTC.