Scarred discrete time crystal in a periodically driven dimerized spin chain

Abstract:We investigate the emergence of a scarred discrete time crystal (SDTC) phase in a periodically driven dimerized spin chain. While generic interacting Floquet systems are expected to thermalize according to the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH), we demonstrate that this system hosts quantum many-body scars (QMBS) that induce a regime of weak ergodicity breaking. Through an analysis of Floquet level statistics, entanglement entropy, and eigenstate fidelity, we identify a manifold of low-entanglement states characterized by semi-Poisson statistics embedded within an otherwise thermal spectrum. These scarred states support robust subharmonic oscillations with period doubling, signaling the spontaneous breaking of discrete time-translation symmetry. We show that the SDTC response is robust against a variety of initial state configurations, demonstrating its stability beyond fine-tuned conditions. A finite-size scaling analysis reveals that the time-crystalline lifetime grows with system size within the range accessible to our exact-diagonalization calculations. However, drawing on the general phenomenology of approximate many-body scars, we expect that hybridization between Floquet scars and the thermal continuum will eventually curtail this growth, causing the lifetime to saturate at system sizes beyond our current numerical reach. This characterizes the SDTC as a long-lived metastable dynamical regime rather than a strictly stable thermodynamic phase, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the interplay between periodic driving and constrained many-body dynamics in disorder-free systems.

Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el); Disordered Systems and Neural Networks (cond-mat.dis-nn); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

arXiv:2608.16616 [cond-mat.str-el]

(or arXiv:2608.16616v1 [cond-mat.str-el] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.16616 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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