Many people in the science world are getting very excited about the fact that we’ve just observed time crystals. And as cool as that sounds, there’s a lot of people left wondering, “Just what the hell are these things anyway?” Well, time crystals are unlike any other material we’ve ever encountered and are different to that of any solid, liquid or gas known to man.
MIT theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, said, “The experiments are beautiful and open up a new class of states of matter that qualitatively are new and fascinating to their right.” Wilczek first came out with the idea of time crystals back in 2012, and while there are some differences in the finer details of the theories the vision remains the same.
In 2014, physicists Haruki Watanabe and Masaki Oshikawa from the University of Tokyo picked up on Wilczek’s work, but these guys didn’t believe in time crystals the way he defined them. Then, two years later another group of physicists from Princeton and the University of California demonstrated that if you gave atoms a little nudge and changed the rules slightly, it’s possible that time crystals did exist. So, physicist Norman Yao of the University of California created a blueprint of what to measure to prove they had created a time crystal.
“The surprising thing about the time crystal is that it’s stable,” commented Yao. When it comes to time crystals, they have a spin that holds two different values, and these values continually swap back and forth at a tempo that it prefers. Two groups who set out to prove the existence of time crystals are a team from the University of Maryland, and another from Harvard. The team from Maryland lined up ten trapped ytterbium ions and hit them with laser pulses to flip the ion’s spins. Even when the team altered the pulse slightly, the ions all kept within their same cycle.
The Harvard group’s method was a little different in that they loaded the regular carbon lattice of a diamond with so many nitrogen atoms that the diamond turned black. Thi team used a microwave field to have the impurities’ spins flip back and forth, and eventually flipping into place with a lower frequency and causing the diamond to fluoresce as a result.
While both groups managed to successfully present evidence that time crystals to exist, we still don’t know how stable they are. “It shows the richness of the phases of matter is even broader [than we thought]. One of the holy grails in physics is understanding what types of matter can exist in nature”, said Yao.
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