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Thermodynamic Quantum Time-Space Crystal: Spontaneous Breaking of Time-Translation Invariance

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Submitted: 2026-07-21
CC BY-NC 4.0 This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Abstract

We suggest and study a model of interacting fermions demonstrating existence of a thermodynamically stable quantum time-space crystal. An order parameter characterizing this state is periodic in both real and imaginary times. The imaginary-time dependence is used for calculation of the free energy of the system, while the real-time dependence leads to non-decaying oscillation of correlation functions of two- and more times. Single-time physical quantities do not depend on time. The oscillation of correlation functions at different time scan in principle be observed in scattering experiments.

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