Time crystal oscillations in interacting, periodically driven many-particle systems are highly regular oscillations that persist for long periods of time, are robust to perturbations, and whose frequency differs from the frequency of the driving signal. Making use of underlying similarities of spatially-extended systems and time-delayed systems (TDSs), we present an experimental demonstration of time-crystal-like behavior in a stochastic, weakly modulated TDS. We consider a semiconductor laser near threshold with delayed feedback, whose output intensity shows abrupt spikes at irregular times. When the laser current is driven with a small-amplitude periodic signal we show that the interaction of delayed feedback and modulation can generate long-range regularity in the timing of the spikes, which lock to the modulation and, despite the presence of noise, remain in phase over thousands of modulation cycles. With pulsed modulation we find harmonic and subharmonic locking, while with sinusoidal modulation, we find only subharmonic locking, which is a characteristic feature of time-crystal behavior.
© 2022. The Author(s).