Time crystals: From Schr\"odinger to Sisyphus

Abstract

A Hamiltonian time crystal can emerge when a Noether symmetry is subject to a condition that prevents the energy minimum from being a critical point of the Hamiltonian. A somewhat trivial example is the Schr\"odinger equation of a harmonic oscillator. The Noether charge for its particle number coincides with the square norm of the wave function, and the energy eigenvalue is a Lagrange multiplier for the condition that the wave function is properly normalized. A more elaborate example is the Gross-Pitaevskii equation that models vortices in a cold atom Bose-Einstein condensate. In an oblate, essentially two dimensional harmonic trap the energy minimum is a topologically protected timecrystalline vortex that rotates around the trap center. Additional examples are constructed using coarse grained Hamiltonian models of closed molecular chains. When knotted, the topology of a chain can support a time crystal. As a physical example, high precision all-atom molecular dynamics is used to analyze an isolated cyclopropane molecule. The simulation reveals that the molecular D$_{3h}$ symmetry becomes spontaneously broken. When the molecule is observed with sufficiently long stroboscopic time steps it appears to rotate like a simple Hamiltonian time crystal. When the length of the stroboscopic time step is decreased the rotational motion becomes increasingly ratcheting and eventually it resembles the back-and-forth oscillations of Sisyphus dynamics. The stroboscopic rotation is entirely due to atomic level oscillatory shape changes, so that cyclopropane is an example of a molecule that can rotate without angular momentum. Finally, the article is concluded with a personal recollection how Frank's and Betsy's Stockholm journey started.