Realization of a discrete time crystal on 57 qubits of a quantum computer

Understand

Novel dynamical phases that violate ergodicity have been a subject of extensive research in recent years.

• A periodically driven system is naively expected to lose all memory of its initial state due to thermalization, yet this can be avoided in the presence of many-body localization.
• A discrete time crystal represents a driven system whose local observables spontaneously break time translation symmetry and retain memory of the initial state indefinitely.
• Here we report the observation of a discrete time crystal on a chain consisting of 57 superconducting qubits on a state--of--the--art quantum computer.