- Letter
Thermal melting of discrete time crystals: A dynamical phase transition induced by thermal fluctuations
Phys. Rev. B 105, L100303 – Published 22 March, 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.L100303
Abstract
The stability of a discrete time crystal against thermal fluctuations has been studied numerically by solving a stochastic Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation of a periodically driven classical system composed of interacting spins, each of which couples to a thermal bath. It is shown that in the thermodynamic limit, even though the long-range temporal crystalline order is stable at low temperature, it is melting above a critical temperature, at which the system experiences a nonequilibrium phase transition. The critical behaviors of the continuous phase transition have been systematically investigated, and it is shown that despite the genuine nonequilibrium feature of such a periodically driven system, its critical properties fall into the three-dimensional Ising universality class with a dynamical exponent () identical to that in the critical dynamics of a kinetic Ising model without driving.