Time Crystal Created in Lab

[Red]

Researchers have created the first time crystal which undergoes symmetry breaking in time, whereas regular crystals break the symmetry of space.

"Time crystals are too new for scientists to have a handle on their potential practical applications. “It’s like a baby, you don’t know what it’s going to grow up to be,” Wilczek says. But, he says, “I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this by a long shot.”

There probably are related systems yet to be uncovered, says Nayak. “We’re just kind of scratching the surface of the kinds of amazing phenomena — such as time crystals — that we can have in nonequilibrium quantum systems. So I think it’s the first window into a whole new arena for us to explore.”"

‘Time crystal’ created in lab

 

[Randall]

Researchers have created the first time crystal which undergoes symmetry breaking in time, whereas regular crystals break the symmetry of space.

"Time crystals are too new for scientists to have a handle on their potential practical applications. “It’s like a baby, you don’t know what it’s going to grow up to be,” Wilczek says. But, he says, “I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this by a long shot.”

There probably are related systems yet to be uncovered, says Nayak. “We’re just kind of scratching the surface of the kinds of amazing phenomena — such as time crystals — that we can have in nonequilibrium quantum systems. So I think it’s the first window into a whole new arena for us to explore.”"

‘Time crystal’ created in lab

It's been my experience in numerous discussions that the nature of time is completely misunderstood, but this is a near perfect example to illustrate what time really is, because basically, time is change. If nothing in the universe changes all the way down to the subatomic level, then there is no time within that universe. One could say that universe is "frozen in time".

Within the realm of this experiment, what we see are ions returning to their initial starting positions, which within that small frame of reference is the same as going backward in time. The thing is, it cannot be applied to a larger frame of reference. This is what breaks the "symmetry of time". That sounds sort of exotic, but it's not really all that surprising. The ions have not really returned to their initial starting positions at all. To do so would require moving everything in the universe back to the exact position and state it was in at the time the positions of the ions were first measured, in which case we would be none the wiser.