Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.
The paper
Extraordinary claims and extraordinary evidence and all, but I’m most intrigued by learning more here.
Yeah, but when will it be in an iPhone, huh?
Colour me ignorant, but what does mean in practical terms?
Will Warhammer Total War be able to have 64 player multiplayer? :O
More likely that games will now be able to fully realise the power of the cloud.
But, in all seriousness, one of the articles mentions one use potentially being in quantum computers themselves:
Quantum computers can solve really hard problems. Unfortunately, they’re brittle. It’s hard to build them, hard to maintain them, hard to get them to do anything, and even harder to interpret the results they give. This is because of something called “decoherence,” which works a lot like entropy.
Computer bits in the quantum world, qubits, share a funky feature of quantum mechanics that makes them act differently when observed than when they’re left alone. That sort of makes any direct measurements of qubit states (reading the computer’s output) difficult.
But time crystals want to be coherent. So putting them inside a quantum computer, and using them to conduct computer processes could potentially serve an incredibly important function: ensuring quantum coherence.
Yup, and that is one seriously extraordinary claim. I’ll wait for something beyond the first flush of breathless, credulous reporting but I too am curious what’s really going on here.
I have no idea what any of this actually means. Are these crystals actual things, or just calculations, collections of equations that define stuff that we think is there?
It’s there, it’s what they created, and it observes certain new properties that aren’t there naturally. But then the coverage commits abuse of language by ignoring that the second law is for isolated systems, which something that changes due to a laser certainly isn’t.
What it means is they have one more piece of the puzzle on what’s wrong/missing from the standard model, maybe one that is useful for QC in the near future, which maybe makes it useful for something in the near future.
As far as I get it, which is very, very far from what I actually know. All these things are very new and theoretical, and need a genius bald creator to figure out how to optimize for human profit, sorry, benefit.
Shit, my Johnson is forever turning itself off and on, and you don’t have to shoot it with a laser (though admittedly many have tried).
Some years from now somebody will get a Nobel for this, if it holds up.
I don’t even have graduated from kindergarten school, so I’m clueless, but I think the paper tells how to observe quantum-magical-qubit-thingie that display a… Non chaotic? Cycle of state of being, ie in a orderly fashion on a time scale, in the way that solid crystals display repeated patterns of structured matters in our more sensible world?
So that “pattern in time” thing, without external interaction(i guess this is what the paper is about: a method of observing it without messing with it? Or to double check it? thanks to the quantum computing?) is what is really new (?)
I’d love for somebody to actually explain what is going on to me as well ;(
I’ll admit that jumped out to me as well, but I assumed they were doing something funky with pre and post laser measurements to confirm the time crystals were not drawing energy from the laser to change state? I haven’t read the paper though.
The article suggests it’s continually fed with a laser to cycle. The paper says:
The existence of ordered phases in periodically driven (Floquet) systems, on the other hand, is counterintuitive:
Since energy is not conserved, one expects thermalization to a featureless maximum-entropy state that is incompatible with quantum order. However, this heat death is averted in the presence of many-body localization […]
I think that means the authors know how it doesn’t challenge (through complicated magic) thermodynamics.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, right? Guess that goes for science, too.
I guess the cool novelty here is that you have a change of state (at the same energy level) without energy consumption, although the energy has to be present in the form of a laser. I wonder if that means the laser energy is taken and then instantaneously given back, or something weirder is happening. Yay, new physics! Disclaimer: not a physicist.
These days the lines between physicist, philosopher, and magician seem somewhat blurry…
I’m pretty sure Time Crystals is the title of one of those offshoot Final Fantasy games.