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  • Letter

Thermal melting of discrete time crystals: A dynamical phase transition induced by thermal fluctuations

Mingxi Yue1,*, Xiaoqin Yang1,*, and Zi Cai1,2,†

  • 1Wilczek Quantum Center and Key Laboratory of Artificial Structures and Quantum Control, School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
  • 2Shanghai Research Center for Quantum Sciences, Shanghai 201315, China

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †zcai@sjtu.edu.cn

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 (z=2) identical to that in the critical dynamics of a kinetic Ising model without driving.

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