Fock space prethermalization and time-crystalline order on a quantum processor

Quantum Physics arXiv:2510.24059 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 28 Oct 2025] Title:Fock space prethermalization and time-crystalline order on a quantum processor Authors:Zehang Bao, Zitian Zhu, Yang-Ren Liu, Zixuan Song, Feitong Jin, Xuhao Zhu, Yu Gao, Chuanyu Zhang, Ning Wang, Yiren Zou, Ziqi Tan, Aosai Zhang, Zhengyi Cui, Fanhao Shen, Jiarun Zhong, Yiyang He, Han Wang, Jia-Nan Yang, Yanzhe Wang, Jiayuan Shen, Gongyu Liu, Yihang Han, Yaozu Wu, Jinfeng Deng, Hang Dong, Pengfei Zhang, Hekang Li, Zhen Wang, Chao Song, Chen Cheng, Rubem Mondaini, Qiujiang Guo, Biao Huang, H. Wang View a PDF of the paper titled Fock space prethermalization and time-crystalline order on a quantum processor, by Zehang Bao and 33 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Periodically driven quantum many-body systems exhibit a wide variety of exotic nonequilibrium phenomena and provide a promising pathway for quantum applications. A fundamental challenge for stabilizing and harnessing these highly entangled states of matter is system heating by energy absorption from the drive. Here, we propose and demonstrate a disorder-free mechanism, dubbed Fock space prethermalization (FSP), to suppress heating. This mechanism divides the Fock-space network into linearly many sparse sub-networks, thereby prolonging the thermalization timescale even for initial states at high energy densities. Using 72 superconducting qubits, we observe an FSP-based time-crystalline order that persists over 120 cycles for generic initial Fock states. The underlying kinetic constraint of approximately conserved domain wall (DW) numbers is identified by measuring site-resolved correlators. Further, we perform finite-size scaling analysis for DW and Fock-space dynamics by varying system sizes, which reveals size-independent regimes for FSP-thermalization crossover and links the dynamical behaviors to the eigenstructure of the Floquet unitary. Our work establishes FSP as a robust mechanism for breaking ergodicity, and paves the way for exploring novel nonequilibrium quantum matter and its applications. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2510.24059 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2510.24059v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.24059 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Zehang Bao [view email] [v1] Tue, 28 Oct 2025 04:40:05 UTC (5,633 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Fock space prethermalization and time-crystalline order on a quantum processor, by Zehang Bao and 33 other authorsView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2025-10 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)