Discrete time crystals stabilized by bounded measurement noise
Abstract
Periodically driven clean interacting systems generically heat up, which destroys discrete time-crystalline order. Here we ask whether continuous weak measurement can stabilize such order. We study a long-range interacting spin chain whose local occupation is continuously monitored. Measurements generally induce a transition from volume-law to area-law entanglement. Yet low entanglement alone is not enough: along typical quantum trajectories, the system still reaches a featureless state with no subharmonic response. In contrast, the most-probable trajectory, obtained by suppressing measurement fluctuations, shows robust period doubling. To connect these limits, we introduce a bounded-noise protocol that restricts measurement fluctuations to a finite window. Narrow windows preserve period doubling. Intermediate windows produce coexisting time-crystalline and non-time-crystalline trajectories. Over time, trajectories leave the time-crystalline group one by one, so the order is long lived but finite. Wide windows destroy the order. Our results establish bounded measurement noise, discarding the large-deviation trajectories, as a route to time-crystalline order in clean systems. They also show that the measurement-induced area-law phase is necessary, but not sufficient, for this order.
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BibTeX
@misc{chatterjee2026discrete,
title = {{Discrete time crystals stabilized by bounded measurement noise}},
author = {Pallabi Chatterjee and Tanay Nag and Ranjan Modak},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.12400},
eprint = {2611.12400},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12400},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Discrete time crystals stabilized by bounded measurement noise
AU - Pallabi Chatterjee
AU - Tanay Nag
AU - Ranjan Modak
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/09
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.12400
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12400
AB - Periodically driven clean interacting systems generically heat up, which destroys discrete time-crystalline order. Here we ask whether continuous weak measurement can stabilize such order. We study a long-range interacting spin chain whose local occupation is continuously monitored. Measurements generally induce a transition from volume-law to area-law entanglement. Yet low entanglement alone is not enough: along typical quantum trajectories, the system still reaches a featureless state with no subharmonic response. In contrast, the most-probable trajectory, obtained by suppressing measurement fluctuations, shows robust period doubling. To connect these limits, we introduce a bounded-noise protocol that restricts measurement fluctuations to a finite window. Narrow windows preserve period doubling. Intermediate windows produce coexisting time-crystalline and non-time-crystalline trajectories. Over time, trajectories leave the time-crystalline group one by one, so the order is long lived but finite. Wide windows destroy the order. Our results establish bounded measurement noise, discarding the large-deviation trajectories, as a route to time-crystalline order in clean systems. They also show that the measurement-induced area-law phase is necessary, but not sufficient, for this order.
ER -