Lifeboat Foundation

In Brief

• Two more teams of researchers have found ways to create time crystals, lattices that repeat not in space but in time, breaking time-translation symmetry.
• Though applications are unclear, the research could help us better understand quantum properties and solve the problem of quantum memory associated with quantum computing.

Time crystals are strange. At the very least, they are a contradiction. A time crystal is quantum phenomenon that demonstrates movement while remaining in its ground, or lowest energy, state. Essentially a non-equilibrium form of matter, time crystals are lattices that repeat not in space but in time, breaking time-translation symmetry.

When the idea of a time crystal was proposed in 2012 by physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, it was only a theoretical possibility that would challenge many of the laws of physics. Then, in October 2016, a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) managed to make a “floquet time crystal.”