TY  - JOUR
PB  - SciPost Foundation
DO  - 10.21468/SciPostPhys.17.3.089
TI  - The role of atomic interactions in cavity-induced continuous time crystals
PY  - 2024/09/24
UR  - https://scipost.org/SciPostPhys.17.3.089
JF  - SciPost Physics
JA  - SciPost Phys.
VL  - 17
IS  - 3
SP  - 089
A1  - Johansen, Christian H.
AU  - Lang, Johannes
AU  - Piazza, Francesco
AB  - We consider continuous time-crystalline phases in dissipative many-body systems of atoms in cavities, focusing on the role of short-range interatomic interactions. First, we show that the latter can alter the nature of the time crystal by changing the type of the underlying critical bifurcation. Second, we characterize the heating mechanism and dynamics resulting from the short-range interactions and demonstrate that they make the time crystal inherently metastable. We argue this is generic for the broader class of dissipative time crystals in atom-cavity systems whenever the cavity loss rate is comparable to the atomic recoil energy. We observe that such a scenario for heating has several similarities to the one proposed for preheating in the early universe, where the oscillating coherent inflation field decays into a cascade of exponentially growing fluctuations. By extending approaches for dissipative dynamical systems to our many-body problem, we obtain analytical predictions for the parameters describing the phase transition and the heating rate inside the time-crystalline phase. We underpin and extend the analytical predictions of the heating rates with numerical simulations, which also show that the metastable regime exists when the inherent stochastic nature is taken into account.
ER  -

@Article{10.21468/SciPostPhys.17.3.089,
	title={{The role of atomic interactions in cavity-induced continuous time crystals}},
	author={Christian Høj Johansen and Johannes Lang and Francesco Piazza},
	journal={SciPost Phys.},
	volume={17},
	pages={089},
	year={2024},
	publisher={SciPost},
	doi={10.21468/SciPostPhys.17.3.089},
	url={https://scipost.org/10.21468/SciPostPhys.17.3.089},
}