SymTFT out of equilibrium: from time crystals to braided drives and Floquet codes

TL;DR

This paper explores how Symmetry Topological Field Theory (SymTFT) can be extended to analyze nonequilibrium 1D periodically driven quantum systems, revealing new phenomena like time crystals, dualities, and braiding effects.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for applying SymTFT to driven systems with dynamical boundary conditions, uncovering novel topological and dynamical phenomena.

Findings

Time crystals as systems with symmetry-twisted temporal boundary conditions

Identification of bulk dual time crystals in phases with boundary time crystals

Exact pumping of symmetry charges via non-Abelian braiding of duality defects

Abstract

Symmetry Topological Field Theory (SymTFT) is a framework to capture universal features of quantum many-body systems by viewing them as a boundary of topological order in one higher dimension. This has yielded numerous insights in static low-energy settings. Here we study what SymTFT can reveal about nonequilibrium, focusing on one-dimensional (1D) periodically driven systems and their 2D SymTFTs. In driven settings, boundary conditions (BCs) can be dynamical and can apply both spatially and temporally. We show how this enters SymTFT via topological operators, which we then use to uncover several new results. These include revealing time crystals (TCs) as systems with symmetry-twisted temporal BCs, robust bulk ``dual TCs" in phases thought to be only boundary TCs, generating drive dualities, or identifying 2D Floquet codes as space-time duals to 1D systems with duality-twisted spatial BCs. We also show how, by making duality-twisted BCs dynamical, non-Abelian braiding of duality defects can enter SymTFT, leading to effects such as the exact pumping of symmetry charges between a system and its BCs. We illustrate our ideas for $\mathbb{Z}_2$-symmetric 1D systems, but our construction applies for any finite Abelian symmetry.