Self-organized photonic time quasicrystal from a single imposed clock

Minwook Kyung; Kyungmin Lee; Yung Kim; Eun-Gook Moon; Joonhee Choi; Bumki Min

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arXiv · 2605.05649

Self-organized photonic time quasicrystal from a single imposed clock

Minwook Kyung·Kyungmin Lee·Yung Kim·Eun-Gook Moon·Joonhee Choi·Bumki Min

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Abstract

A photonic time crystal usually writes a clock into a medium. Here one clock does more than program the medium: it seeds a quasiperiodic temporal order that the nonlinear medium selects for itself. In a guided-wave lattice of nonlinear dipoles, a single-tone pump modulates the polarization sector, while Maxwell--polarization back-action selects two response frequencies whose only resolved low-order relation is the pump-locked sum condition. Their sum phase locks to the pump and the complementary phase winds, producing a photonic discrete time quasicrystal with torus-like phase dynamics and a discrete combination spectrum. Site-resolved measurements show locked-phase coherence across the measured lattice sites over a finite control-parameter window. These results establish a route from externally programmed time-varying media to self-organized temporal order in nonlinear photonic systems.

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Minwook Kyung, Kyungmin Lee, Yung Kim, Eun-Gook Moon, Joonhee Choi, Bumki Min. 2026-05-07. Self-organized photonic time quasicrystal from a single imposed clock. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.05649

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