Spatiotemporally ordered patterns in a chain of coupled dissipative kicked rotors

Abstract

In this work we consider the dynamics of a chain of many coupled kicked rotors with dissipation. We map a rich phase diagram with many dynamical regimes. We focus mainly on a regime where the system shows period doubling, and forms patterns that are persistent and depend on the stroboscopic time with period double than that of the driving: The system shows a form of spatiotemporal ordering analogous to quantum Floquet time crystals. Spatiotemporally ordered patterns can be understood by means of a linear-stability analysis that predicts an instability region that contains the spatiotemporally ordered regime. The boundary of the instability region coincides with the lower boundary of the spatiotemporally ordered regime, and the most unstable mode has length scale double than the lattice spacing, a feature that we observe in the spatiotemporally ordered patterns: Period doubling occurs both in time and space. We propose an implementation of this model in an array of SQUID Josephson junctions with a pulsed time-periodic flux.