Southwest Quantum Information and Technology

Quantum chaos and emergent time crystal phases in driven collective spin systems

Presenting Author: Manuel Munoz-Arias, University of New Mexico CQuIC
Contributing Author(s): Karthik Chinni, Pablo Poggi, Ivan Deutsch

We introduce a family of kicked p-spin models describing the Floquet dynamics of a collective spin undergoing Larmor precession and p-order twisting. The twisting corresponds to all-to-all p-body interactions between N constituent spin-½ particles of the collective J=N/2 spin.   We fully characterize the classical nonlinear dynamics of these models which describes the motion of a top on sphere, including the transition to global Hamiltonian chaos. The classical analysis allows us to build a classification for this family of models, distinguishing between p = 2 and p > 2, and between models with odd and even p's. Many signatures of these nonlinear dynamics carry over to the quantum domain leading to complex behavior. We present a connection between resonances and bifurcations in the mean-field description of these models and the emergence of Floquet time crystal (FTC) phases. We provide evidence that a given kicked p-spin gives rise to at least one FTC phase in the vicinity of the 1-p bifurcation, with more FTC phases being possible depending of the value of p. Finally in models hosting a least two different FTC phases we introduced the idea of time-crystal switching.

Read this article online: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.103.052212

(Session 5 : Thursday from 12:00pm-2:00 pm)