IQI Weekly Seminar

Abstract: The interplay between periodic driving, disorder, and strong interactions has been predicted to result in exotic ``time­ crystalline'' phases, which spontaneously break the discrete time­-translation symmetry of the underlying drive. In this talk, I will present the experimental observation of such discrete time­ crystalline order in a driven, disordered ensemble of dipolar spin impurities in diamond at room temperature. We observe long-lived temporal correlations, experimentally identify the phase boundary and find that the temporal order is protected by strong interactions. We quantitatively explain these observations using resonance counting, which reveals critically slow thermalization dynamics as the origin of the observed long lived order. Finally, I will discuss how such strongly interacting, driven many-body systems can be harnessed for quantum enhanced metrology.