Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) occurs when a many-body system governed by a symmetric Hamiltonian, and prepared in a symmetry-broken state by the application of a field coupling to its order parameter $O$, retains a finite $O$ value even after the field is switched off. SSB is generally thought to occur only in the thermodynamic limit $N\to \infty$ (for $N$ degrees of freedom). In this limit, the time to restore the symmetry once the field is turned off, either via thermal or quantum fluctuations, is expected to diverge. Here, we show that SSB can also be observed in finite-size quantum spin systems, provided that the spin is half-integer and three conditions are met: (1) the ground state of the system has long-range correlations, (2) the Hamiltonian conserves the (spin) parity of the order parameter, and (3) $N$ is odd. Using a combination of analytical arguments and numerical results (based on time-dependent variational Monte Carlo and rotor + spin-wave theory), we show that SSB on finite-size systems can be achieved via a quasiadiabatic preparation of the ground state—which, in U(1)-symmetric systems, is shown to require a symmetry-breaking field vanishing over timescales $\tau \sim O(N)$. In these systems, the symmetry-broken state exhibits spin squeezing with Heisenberg scaling.

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• Dipolar Rydberg atoms
• Quantum entanglement
• Quantum metrology
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking
• Squeezing of quantum noise