Subharmonic spin correlations and spectral pairing in Floquet time crystals

Abstract

Floquet time crystals are characterized by the subharmonic behavior of temporal correlation functions. Studying the paradigmatic time crystal based on the disordered Floquet quantum Ising model, we show that its temporal spin correlations are directly related to spectral characteristics and that this relation provides analytical expressions for the correlation function of finite chains, which compare favorably with numerical simulations. Specifically, we show that the disorder-averaged temporal spin correlations are proportional to the Fourier transform of the splitting distribution of the pairs of eigenvalues of the Floquet operator, which differ by 𝜋 to exponential accuracy in the chain length. We find that the splittings are well described by a log-normal distribution, implying that the temporal spin correlations are characterized by two parameters. We discuss possible implications for the phase diagram of Floquet time crystals.