Seasonal epidemic spreading on small-world networks: Biennial outbreaks and classical discrete time crystals

Malz, Daniel; Pizzi, Andrea; Nunnenkamp, Andreas; Knolle, Johannes

We study seasonal epidemic spreading in a susceptible-infected-removed-susceptible (SIRS) model on smallworld graphs. We derive a mean-field description that accurately captures the salient features of the model, most notably a phase transition between annual and biennial outbreaks. A numerical scaling analysis exhibits a diverging autocorrelation time in the thermodynamic limit, which confirms the presence of a classical discrete time crystalline phase. We derive the phase diagram of the model both from mean-field theory and from numerics. Our work offers new perspectives by demonstrating that small-worldness and non-Markovianity can stabilize a classical discrete time crystal, and by linking recent efforts to understand such dynamical phases of matter to the century-old problem of biennial epidemics.