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The conventional framework for defining and understanding phases of matter requires thermodynamic equilibrium. Extensions to non-equilibrium systems have led to surprising insights into the nature of many-body thermalization and the discovery of novel phases of matter, often catalyzed by driving the system periodically. The inherent heating from such Floquet drives can be tempered by including strong disorder in the system, but this can also mask the generality of non-equilibrium phases. In this work, we utilize a trapped-ion quantum simulator to observe signatures of a non-equilibrium driven phase without disorder: the prethermal discrete time crystal (PDTC). Here, many-body heating is suppressed not by disorder-induced many-body localization, but instead via high-frequency driving, leading to an expansive time window where non-equilibrium phases can emerge. We observe a number of key features that distinguish the PDTC from its many-body-localized disordered counterpart, such as the drive-frequency control of its lifetime and the dependence of time-crystalline order on the energy density of the initial state. Floquet prethermalization is thus presented as a general strategy for creating, stabilizing and studying intrinsically out-of-equilibrium phases of matter.
We demonstrate that the prethermal regime of periodically-driven, classical many-body systems can host non-equilibrium phases of matter. In particular, we show that there exists an effective Hamiltonian, which captures the dynamics of ensembles of cl
Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a fundamental concept in many areas of physics, ranging from cosmology and particle physics to condensed matter. A prime example is the breaking of spatial translation symmetry, which underlies the formation of crysta
The use of periodic driving for synthesizing many-body quantum states depends crucially on the existence of a prethermal regime, which exhibits drive-tunable properties while forestalling the effects of heating. This motivates the search for direct e
We report the observation of a symmetry-protected topological time crystal, which is implemented with an array of programmable superconducting qubits. Unlike the time crystals reported in previous experiments, where spontaneous breaking of the discre
Periodically driven quantum systems host a range of non-equilibrium phenomena which are unrealizable at equilibrium. Discrete time-translational symmetry in a periodically driven many-body system can be spontaneously broken to form a discrete time cr