Chaos in Time: A Dissipative Continuous Quasi Time Crystals

Abstract: While a generic open quantum system decays to its steady state, continuous time crystals (CTCs) develop spontaneous oscillation and never converge to a stationary state. Just as crystals develop correlations in space, CTCs do so in time. Here, we introduce a Continuous Quasi Time Crystals (CQTC). Despite being characterized by the presence of non-decaying oscillations, this phase does not retain its long-range order, making it the time analogous of quasi-crystal structures. We investigate the emergence of this phase in a system made of two coupled collective spin sub-systems, each developing a CTC phase upon the action of a strong enough drive. The addition of a coupling enables the emergence of different synchronized phases, where both sub-systems oscillate at the same frequency. In the transition between different CTC orders, the system develops chaotic dynamics with aperiodic oscillations. These chaotic features differ from those of closed quantum systems, as the dynamics is not characterized by a unitary evolution. At the same time, the presence of non-decaying oscillations makes this phenomenon distinct from other form of chaos in open quantum system, where the system decays instead. We investigate the connection between chaos and this quasi-crystalline phase using mean-field techniques, and we confirm these results including quantum fluctuations at the lowest order.