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Updated: Oct 20, 2025

Generation and Coherent Control of Pulsed Quantum Frequency Combs
Published on: June 8, 2018
Discrete Time-Crystalline Order Enabled by Quantum Many-Body Scars: Entanglement Steering via Periodic Driving
N Maskara1, A A Michailidis2, W W Ho1,3
1Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Abstract:
The control of many-body quantum dynamics in complex systems is a key challenge in the quest to reliably produce and manipulate large-scale quantum entangled states. Recently, quench experiments in Rydberg atom arrays [Bluvstein et al. Science 371, 1355 (2021)SCIEAS0036-807510.1126/science.abg2530] demonstrated that coherent revivals associated with quantum many-body scars can be stabilized by periodic driving, generating stable subharmonic responses over a wide parameter regime. We analyze a simple, related model where these phenomena originate from spatiotemporal ordering in an effective Floquet unitary, corresponding to discrete time-crystalline behavior in a prethermal regime. Unlike conventional discrete time crystals, the subharmonic response exists only for Néel-like initial states, associated with quantum scars. We predict robustness to perturbations and identify emergent timescales that could be observed in future experiments. Our results suggest a route to controlling entanglement in interacting quantum systems by combining periodic driving with many-body scars.
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