Discrete time crystals in a 50-nuclear-spin quantum simulator in diamond

Individually controllable 13C nuclear spins in diamond, associated with a single NV-center, can be used to realise a quantum simulator [1, 2] for the observation of many-body quantum phenomena. With such a system we can obtain a range of tunable Floquet Hamiltonians with which it is possible to observe the characteristic long-lived response of a discrete time crystal in a 1D chain of spins [3]. Pioneering experiments on other platforms have also shown the emergence of time-crystalline order with ensembles of spins with dipolar interactions by measuring the overall polarization of the ensemble [4, 5]. Here, we tune the Hamiltonian of our system to create a Floquet driven system with 3D dipolar interactions and individual spin-qubit control and readout [1, 2]. This allows us to study the response of a many-body spin system to Floquet driving on a single spin level.

[1] C. Bradley et al., Physical Review X  9, 031045, 2019.

[2] G. van de Stolpe et al., arXiv:2307.06939, 2023.

[3] J. Randall et al., Science 374, 1474,  2021.

[4] S. Choi et al., Nature 543, 221, 2017.

[5] J. Choi et al., Physical Review Letters 122, 043603, 2019.