Self-organized photonic time quasicrystal from a single imposed clock

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the emergence of a self-organized photonic time quasicrystal in a nonlinear medium, driven by a single imposed clock, revealing new routes to temporal order in photonics.

Contribution

It introduces a method where a single-frequency pump induces self-organized quasiperiodic temporal order in a nonlinear photonic system, unlike traditional externally programmed time crystals.

Findings

Observation of a photonic discrete time quasicrystal with phase locking.

Site-resolved measurements show coherence across the lattice.

Identification of a route from external modulation to self-organized temporal order.

Abstract

A photonic time crystal usually writes a clock into a medium. Here one clock does more than program the medium: it seeds a quasiperiodic temporal order that the nonlinear medium selects for itself. In a guided-wave lattice of nonlinear dipoles, a single-tone pump modulates the polarization sector, while Maxwell--polarization back-action selects two response frequencies whose only resolved low-order relation is the pump-locked sum condition. Their sum phase locks to the pump and the complementary phase winds, producing a photonic discrete time quasicrystal with torus-like phase dynamics and a discrete combination spectrum. Site-resolved measurements show locked-phase coherence across the measured lattice sites over a finite control-parameter window. These results establish a route from externally programmed time-varying media to self-organized temporal order in nonlinear photonic systems.