Chetan Nayak

The spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry has led to the discovery of a new phase of matter - the discrete time crystal. Discrete time crystals exhibit rigid subharmonic oscillations, which result from a combination of many-body interactions, collective synchronization, and ergodicity breaking. This Colloquium reviews recent theoretical and experimental advances in the study of quantum and classical discrete time crystals. We focus on the breaking of ergodicity as the key to discrete time crystals and the delaying of ergodicity as the source of numerous phenomena that share many of the properties of discrete time crystals, including the AC Josephson effect, coupled map lattices, and Faraday waves. Theoretically, there exists a diverse array of strategies to stabilize time crystalline order in both closed and open systems, ranging from localization and prethermalization to dissipation and error correction. Experimentally, many-body quantum simulators provide a natural platform for investigating signatures of time crystalline order; recent work utilizing trapped ions, solid-state spin systems, and superconducting qubits will be reviewed. Finally, this Colloquium concludes by describing outstanding challenges in the field and a vision for new directions on both the experimental and theoretical fronts.

The conventional framework for defining and understanding phases of matter requires thermodynamic equilibrium. Extensions to non-equilibrium systems have led to surprising insights into the nature of many-body thermalization and the discovery of novel phases of matter, often catalyzed by driving the system periodically. The inherent heating from such Floquet drives can be tempered by including strong disorder in the system, but this can also mask the generality of non-equilibrium phases. In this work, we utilize a trapped-ion quantum simulator to observe signatures of a non-equilibrium driven phase without disorder: the prethermal discrete time crystal (PDTC). Here, many-body heating is suppressed not by disorder-induced many-body localization, but instead via high-frequency driving, leading to an expansive time window where non-equilibrium phases can emerge. We observe a number of key features that distinguish the PDTC from its many-body-localized disordered counterpart, such as the drive-frequency control of its lifetime and the dependence of time-crystalline order on the energy density of the initial state. Floquet prethermalization is thus presented as a general strategy for creating, stabilizing and studying intrinsically out-of-equilibrium phases of matter.

We prove that quantum information encoded in some topological excitations, including certain Majorana zero modes, is protected in closed systems for a time scale exponentially long in system parameters. This protection holds even at infinite temperature. At lower temperatures the decay time becomes even longer, with a temperature dependence controlled by an effective gap that is parametrically larger than the actual energy gap of the system. This non-equilibrium dynamical phenomenon is a form of prethermalization, and occurs because of obstructions to the equilibriation of edge or defect degrees of freedom with the bulk. We analyze the ramifications for ordered and topological phases in one, two, and three dimensions, with examples including Majorana and parafermionic zero modes in interacting spin chains. Our results are based on a non-perturbative analysis valid in any dimension, and they are illustrated by numerical simulations in one dimension. We discuss the implications for experiments on quantum-dot chains tuned into a regime supporting end Majorana zero modes, and on trapped ion chains.