In this work, we report a ubiquitous presence of topological Floquet time crystal ($\mathrm{TFTC}$) in one-dimensional periodically driven systems. The rigidity and realization of spontaneous discrete time-translation symmetry ($\mathrm{DTS}$) breaking in our $\mathrm{TFTC}$ model require necessarily coexistence of anomalous topological invariants (0 modes and $\pi$ modes), instead of the presence of disorders or many-body localization. We found that in a particular frequency range of the underlying drive, the anomalous Floquet phase coexistence between 0 and $\pi$ modes can produce the period doubling ($2T$, two cycles of the drive) that breaks the $\mathrm{DTS}$ spontaneously, leading to the subharmonic response ($\omega /2$, half the drive frequency). The rigid period-$2T$ oscillation is topologically protected against perturbations due to both nontrivially opening of 0 and $\pi$ gaps in the quasienergy spectrum, thus, as a result, can be viewed as a specific “Rabi oscillation” between two Floquet eigenstates with certain quasienergy splitting $\pi /T$. Our modeling of the time-crystalline “ground state” can be easily realized in experimental platforms such as topological photonics and ultracold fields. Also, our work can bring significant interest to explore topological phase transition in Floquet systems and to bridge the gap between Floquet topological insulators and photonics, and period-doubled time crystals.

• Received 12 October 2019
• Accepted 9 September 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.043239

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society