Discrete time crystals in disordered anisotropic Heisenberg chains

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04037v1
• Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:12:09 GMT
• Title: Discrete time crystals in disordered anisotropic Heisenberg chains
• Abstract summary: A discrete time crystal is an out-of-equilibrium phase of matter characterized by the spontaneous breaking of discrete time-translation symmetry.<n>We provide evidence for discrete time-crystalline behavior in strongly disordered spin chains with Heisenberg interactions.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: A discrete time crystal is an out-of-equilibrium phase of matter characterized by the spontaneous breaking of discrete time-translation symmetry. Using extensive numerical simulations based on matrix-product-state methods, we provide evidence for discrete time-crystalline behavior in strongly disordered spin chains with Heisenberg interactions, including the isotropic point, subject to periodic driving. Starting from a many-body localized regime, we observe that rotations induced by delta kicks produce a pronounced subharmonic response at half the drive frequency in spin observables. We investigate the stability of this response against rotation-angle errors through entanglement entropy, quantum Fisher information, short-range spin correlations, and restricted-control ergotropy. Increasing the rotation error reveals an intermediate dynamical regime separating the time-crystalline and Floquet-localized responses. In this regime, most observables exhibit signatures of weakly correlated dynamics reminiscent of Anderson localization.

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