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arXiv:2508.06444

Nonreciprocal and Geometric Frustration in Dissipative Quantum Spins

Guitao Lyu, Myung-Joong Hwang

Published Aug 8, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Nonreciprocal interactions often create conflicting dynamical objectives that cannot be simultaneously satisfied, leading to nonreciprocal frustration. On the other hand, geometric frustration arises when conflicting static objectives in energy minimization cannot be satisfied. In this work, we show that nonreciprocal interaction among three collective quantum spins, mediated by a damped cavity, induces not only nonreciprocal frustration, intrinsic to nonreciprocity, but also geometric frustration with a remarkable robustness against disorder. It therefore ensures that the accidental degeneracy for steady states remains intact even when the system is perturbed away from a fine-tuned point of enhanced symmetry, in sharp contrast to the equilibrium case. Leveraging this finding, we identify a nonreciprocal phase transition driven by both geometric and nonreciprocal frustration. It gives rise to a time-dependent state, which shows a chiral dynamics along a geometry shaped by the geometric frustration and dynamically restores the broken discrete symmetries. Moreover, it constitutes a time-crystalline order, with multiple harmonics set by an emergent time scale that exhibits critical slowing down. Our predictions have important physical implications for a three-component spinor BEC-cavity system, which manifest as a geometric frustration in the structural phase transition and chiral dynamics of the frustrated self-organized BECs. We demonstrate the feasibility of experimental observation despite the presence of disorder in the spin-cavity coupling strengths.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2508.06444

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Nonreciprocal interactions often create conflicting dynamical objectives that cannot be simultaneously satisfied, leading to nonreciprocal frustration. On the other hand, geometric frustration arises when conflicting static objectives in energy minimization cannot be satisfied. In this work, we show that nonreciprocal interaction among three collective quantum spins, mediated by a damped cavity, induces not only nonreciprocal frustration, intrinsic to nonreciprocity, but also geometric frustration with a remarkable robustness against disorder. It therefore ensures that the accidental degeneracy for steady states remains intact even when the system is perturbed away from a fine-tuned point of enhanced symmetry, in sharp contrast to the equilibrium case. Leveraging this finding, we identify a nonreciprocal phase transition driven by both geometric and nonreciprocal frustration. It gives rise to a time-dependent state, which shows a chiral dynamics along a geometry shaped by the geometric frustration and dynamically restores the broken discrete symmetries. Moreover, it constitutes a time-crystalline order, with multiple harmonics set by an emergent time scale that exhibits critical slowing down. Our predictions have important physical implications for a three-component spinor BEC-cavity system, which manifest as a geometric frustration in the structural phase transition and chiral dynamics of the frustrated self-organized BECs. We demonstrate the feasibility of experimental observation despite the presence of disorder in the spin-cavity coupling strengths.
Active agents are capable of exerting nonreciprocal forces upon one another. For instance, one agent, say A , may attract another agent B while B repels A . These antagonistic nonreciprocal interactions have been extensively studied in classical systems, revealing a wealth of exciting phenomena such as novel phase transitions and traveling-wave states. Whether these phenomena can originate in quantum many-body systems is an open issue, and proposals for their realization are lacking. In this work, we present a model of two species of quantum spins that interact in an antagonistic nonreciprocal way of the attraction-repulsion type. We propose an implementation based on two atomic ensembles coupled via chiral waveguides featuring both braided and nonbraided geometries. The spins are active due to the presence of local gain, which allows them to synchronize. In the thermodynamic limit, we show that nonreciprocal interactions result in a nonreciprocal phase transition to time-crystalline traveling-wave states, associated with spontaneous breaking of parity-time symmetry. We establish how this symmetry emerges from the microscopic quantum model. For a finite number of spins, signatures of the time-crystal phase can still be identified by inspecting equal-time or two-time correlation functions. Remarkably, continuous monitoring of the output field of the waveguides induces a quantum traveling-wave state: a time-crystalline state of a finite-size quantum system, in which parity-time symmetry is spontaneously broken. Our work lays the foundation to explore nonreciprocal interactions in active quantum matter.
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We establish a link between metastability and a discrete time-crystalline phase in a periodically driven open quantum system. The mechanism we highlight requires neither the system to display any microscopic symmetry nor the presence of disorder, but relies instead on the emergence of a metastable regime. We investigate this in detail in an open quantum spin system, which is a canonical model for the exploration of collective phenomena in strongly interacting dissipative Rydberg gases. Here, a semiclassical approach reveals the emergence of a robust discrete time-crystalline phase in the thermodynamic limit in which metastability, dissipation, and interparticle interactions play a crucial role. We perform numerical simulations in order to investigate the dependence on the range of interactions, from all to all to short ranged, and the scaling with system size of the lifetime of the time crystal.
We describe simulations of the quantum dynamics of a confocal cavity QED system that realizes an intrinsically driven-dissipative spin glass.A close connection between open quantum dynamics and replica symmetry breaking is established, in which individual quantum trajectories are the replicas.We observe that entanglement plays an important role in the emergence of replica symmetry breaking in a fully connected, frustrated spin network of up to 15 spin-1=2 particles.Quantum trajectories of entangled spins reach steady-state spin configurations of lower energy than that of semiclassical trajectories.Cavity emission allows monitoring of the continuous stochastic evolution of spin configurations, while backaction from this projects entangled states into states of broken Ising and replica symmetry.The emergence of spin glass order manifests itself through the simultaneous absence of magnetization and the presence of nontrivial spin overlap density distributions among replicas.Moreover, these overlaps reveal incipient ultrametric order, in line with the Parisi replica symmetry breaking solution for the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model.A nonthermal Parisi order parameter distribution, however, highlights the driven-dissipative nature of this quantum optical spin glass.This practicable system could serve as a test bed for exploring how quantum effects enrich the physics of spin glasses.
Non-reciprocity and geometric frustration enable many-body systems to avoid crystalline order and instead exhibit complex, liquid-like behavior. Here we show that their interplay is richer than the sum of its parts, leading to surprising structural and dynamical phenomena. In our minimal model, two copies of Ising gauge theory are non-reciprocally coupled in a way that crucially preserves a local Z2\mathbb{Z}_2Z2​ symmetry. We discover that the combined Wilson loop observable of the two copies exhibits linear asymptotic scaling, with a quasiparticle-pair confinement length tuned by the strength of the non-reciprocal coupling. Key dynamical features are revealed in the behavior of individual deconfined excitations due to strong interactions induced by the non-reciprocity, leading to motion on a critical percolation cluster that follows a self-avoiding trail. Mapping from this quasiparticle dynamics onto the magnetic noise spectrum, we discover that non-reciprocity tunes topological logarithmic contributions and causes long-lived metastable states due to quasiparticle trapping. Our work opens the way for broader investigations of geometrically frustrated non-reciprocity.