Time Crystals Exist, and We Can Create Them

It’s confirmed. Time crystals can exist. Two teams of researchers, one from Harvard University and University of Maryland, had their peer-reviewed work on time crystals published today in the journal Nature. The Harvard-based team used an experimental setup that created an artificial lattice in a synthetic diamond. The Maryland team, on the other hand, continued on their previous work using a chain of charged particles called ytterbium ions.
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Both studies built off of time crystal theories developed from Princeton University. “Our work discovered the essential physics of how time crystals function,” said Princeton’s Shivaji Sondhi. “What is more, this discovery builds on a set of developments at Princeton that gets at the issue of how we understand complex systems in and out of equilibrium, which is centrally important to how physicists explain the nature of the everyday world.”

Unlike other, more conventional crystals, time crystals are lattices that repeat not just in space but also in time, breaking what is known as time-translation symmetry. A time crystal is a quantum phenomenon that has movement while remaining in its ground, or lowest energy, state. In other words, it moves without spending energy and does not settle into a thermal equilibrium. It’s one of the first examples of a non-equilibrium phase of matter.

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Physicists: Time Crystals Exist, and We Can Create Them