Sufficient Condition for Gapless Spin-Boson Lindbladians, and Its Connection to Dissipative Time Crystals.

Abstract

We discuss a sufficient condition for gapless excitations in the Lindbladian master equation for collective spin-boson systems and permutationally invariant systems. The condition relates a nonzero macroscopic cumulant correlation in the steady state to the presence of gapless modes in the Lindbladian. In phases arising from competing coherent and dissipative Lindbladian terms, we argue that such gapless modes, concomitant with angular momentum conservation, can lead to persistent dynamics in the spin observables with the possible formation of dissipative time crystals. We study different models within this perspective, from Lindbladians with Hermitian jump operators, to non-Hermitian ones composed by collective spins and Floquet spin-boson systems. We also provide a simple analytical proof for the exactness of the mean-field semiclassical approach in such systems based on a cumulant expansion.