Time Crystal

Physics Defying Phase of Matter, The Prohibition against Perpetual Motion

5 min readOct 25, 2022

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” ― Werner Heisenberg

Time Crystal- may sound like something from the MCU or perhaps from one of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi films, but trust me it’s as real as a diamond.

Time

We all are aware of the three dimensions through which we move through space, described by three independent directions, with the location accurately described by the three spatial coordinates familiar to us: x, y, and z. In addition to these, you also need a time coordinate: t.

Time, the fourth dimension that is equally significant, even though it is very different from the other three dimensions.

Crystal

Crystals like salt, diamond, and emerald may already be familiar to you. At the microscopic level, they’re made up of repeating patterns — many layers of atoms that ultimately form a physical structure. A grain of salt, for instance, is composed of sodium and chlorine atoms.

A time crystal is similar, but it creates oscillating patterns in time as opposed to repeating patterns in space.

Time crystals were first proposed in 2012 by the American theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek.

Breaking the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

A time crystal creates oscillating patterns in time, in doing so, these time crystals can defy a concept known as entropy. Entropy is defined by the second law of thermodynamics as the process by which any system becomes more disordered over time.

Do Time Crystals prove that Perpetual Motion is real then?

I am sure that you must have heard of a Perpetual Motion Machine at some point of your life and how it can sustain life indefinitely. Perpetual motion is the state of a machine in which, once set in motion, it would continue in motion forever, with no additional energy required to maintain it.

Time crystals are different from perpetual motion machines due to the input of energy during its formation. In October 2016, when Christopher Monroe and a team of researchers at the University of Maryland claimed to have created the world’s first discrete time crystal, they sent in a pulsed coherent microwave light during the experiment. Even though the time crystals didn’t absorb any energy, the experiment still does not prove that perpetual motion is real.

Role of Google’s Quantum Computer

In November 2021, researchers at Google Quantum AI and their colleagues reveal they have created time crystals using Google’s Sycamore quantum computing hardware, whose findings they have detailed online in the journal ‘Nature’ (Nov. 30).

What is a Quantum Computer?

Classical computers switch transistors either on or off to symbolize data as ones and zeroes, Quantum computers use quantum bits, or Qubits that, because of the nature of quantum mechanics, can exist in a state of superposition where they are both 1 and 0 simultaneously. By linking qubits together via a quantum effect known as entanglement, a 300-qubit quantum computer theoretically could perform more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the visible universe.

What’s next?

Overcoming the Limitations

The First Experiment: Linking of Crystals

Due to their quantum mechanical nature, time crystals can operate at 100% efficiency only when fully isolated from their environment. This requirement places a limit on how long they can be observed before wave-function collapse causes them to break down entirely.

Dr. Samuli Autti from Lancaster University and his team have however overcome this barrier and succeeded in connecting two time crystals by cooling a quantity of helium-3. Before the wave function of the time crystals decayed, they observed this pairing of time crystals for a record time of roughly 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes), which corresponds to billions of periods of oscillating or spinning motion of the atoms.

“It turns out, putting two of them together works beautifully,” Autti said. The research was published June 2 in the journal Nature Communications. The findings create a promising line of research and this first experiment to link two time crystals has created the basic building block of a quantum computer.

Why Would You Care?

Looking Forward: Emerging Technologies and Applications

Its understandable if the terminology was a little more technical than you would have anticipated at first. You might ask yourself the question that how do these time crystals impact your life or you might think that Quantum Computer and Time Crystals are a thing of the distant future but, I would like to tell you that this idea was only conceived in 2012. In 9 years, we have substantially progressed in the field of quantum technology and have already developed a tangible result.

It has already been established through previous experiments that crystals can occasionally function at room temperature rather than needing to be cooled to almost absolute zero, making their construction even easier. The next task, Autti’s team said, is to demonstrate that logic gate operations, which are functions that allow a computer to process information, can operate between two or more time crystals.

Time crystals, according to some scientists, could one day serve as memory for quantum computers.

“Maybe time crystals will eventually power some quantum features in your smartphone,” Autti said.

Time crystals are “something that doesn’t actually exist in nature,” he said. “As far as we know, we created this phase of matter. Whether something will come out of that, it’s difficult to say.”

Thank You for reading ! What do you think, what lies ahead of us, leave a comment below describing, how you think this ground-braking invention will change our future.

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