Scientists unveil new form of matter: Time crystals
Normal crystals, likes diamond, are an atomic lattice that repeats in space, but physicists recently suggested making materials that repeat in time. Last year, reseachers sketched out the phases surrounding a time crystal and what to measure in order to confirm that this new material is actually a stable phase of matter. This stimulated two teams to build a time crystal, the first examples of a non-equilibrium form of matter. Ref. Source 3n.
I think this is really cool. I actually work with a lot of theoretical and experimental crystals. I haven't thought about breaking time symmetry instead of spacial symmetry, but I guess it works the same. By being able to break time symmetry instead of space symmetry, we can actually get materials that many change in space, but stay the same in time. It could lead to whole new communication system. These are some really cool ideas discussed in this paper.
Creating time crystals
Researchers created a previously-only-theoretical time crystal using a small piece of diamond embedded with millions of atomic-scale impurities known as nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. They then used microwave pulses to 'kick' the system out of equilibrium, causing the NV center's spins to flip at precisely-timed intervals. Ref. Source 4c.
Now this is incredibly cool stuff. Adding a fourth dimension is stuff that was mostly science fiction just a short time ago. The strides we are making in science are growing larger with each passing year. It took humanity tens of thousands of years to develop (Invent) an agriculture based society. It took thousands of years to go from an abacus to a computer. It took just decades to go from computers that filled a room to computers that could sit on a desk. Now, it has taken only a few years to put computers on our phones and in virtually everything else that we interface with. With this discovery will be travelling across time soon? And if so, what implications does that have?