Many-body physics in the NISQ era: quantum programming a discrete time crystal

Understand

Recent progress in the realm of noisy, intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices represents an exciting opportunity for many-body physics, by introducing new laboratory platforms with unprecedented control and measurement capabilities.

• We explore the implications of NISQ platforms for many-body physics in a practical sense: we ask which {\it physical phenomena}, in the domain of quantum statistical mechanics, they may realize more readily than traditional experimental platforms.
• As a particularly well-suited target, we identify discrete time crystals (DTCs), novel non-equilibrium states of matter that break time translation symmetry.
• These can only be realized in the intrinsically out-of-equilibrium setting of periodically driven quantum systems stabilized by disorder induced many-body localization.