Forget solids, liquids and gases – scientists have created a new and far more futuristic sounding state of matter: time crystals.
As sci-fi as it sounds, the incredibly complicated concept can be boiled down to a pretty simple explanation.
Solid crystals that we know and love, such as table salt, diamonds and snowflakes, are so-called because the have a regular pattern in 3D that repeats across the structure.
Now get ready for the mind-blowing bit: Time crystals are a phase (like a solid or gas) where the crystal’s atoms repeat through time instead of space.
But what does that actually mean? Well, atoms in a crystal sit where they do because they prefer a specific place within the structure. With time crystals, the atoms prefer different states at different points in time. Plus, it’s asymmetrical as it looks different depending on where you look at it from.
To cause this asymmetry with time, the scientists gave the atoms a push in the right direction by zapping them with a laser, but when they did the flip only happened half as often as the laser flashed.
Norman Yao, who was part of the team that made them, told Nature: “It’s like playing with a jump rope, and somehow our arm goes around twice but the rope only goes around once”.
Still confused? Fair enough.
User Jrix on Reddit explained it pretty well. They said to imagine a super frozen egg (referring to the fact that the experiments are supercooled) and then imagine the egg flips itself upside down every five seconds and that’s just one of its properties, like being white, or enclosed in a shell.
Now imagine something that flips five seconds after you click a button. The fact that it ‘knows’ five seconds are up means you can harness it to complete a circuit using very little energy, which could come in handy in computing.
Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek from MIT came up with the idea back in 2012 while he was teaching a class about normal crystals. After a handful of studies on the theory, two groups of scientists (one from the University of Maryland and another from Harvard) have now managed to create them in a lab.
This is uncharted territory, so scientists aren’t sure how exactly to harness the phenomenon just yet, although it could make up part of a quantum computer.
Although the two teams announced they’d created the time crystals in January, their studies have only just been approved by reviewers and published in the journal Nature here and here.
