The words “time crystal” evoke all sorts of time-honored tropes from science fiction and the gaming industry. But time crystals are a little different: rather than having these patterns repeat only in space, they repeat both in time and space. Simply explained, time crystals are a new, exotic state of matter, similar to https://interestingengineering.com/scientists-created-supersolid-state-of-matter-new-dimension, https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/730694 and https://www.livescience.com/46506-states-of-matter.html.

Crucially, the researchers’ new time crystal system exhibits what is known as https://www.pks.mpg.de/condensed-matter/research-areas/many-body-localization (MBL), a dynamical phenomenon in quantum systems that prevents the discrete time crystal from thermalizing (or heating up), thus establishing that this is indeed true, a true time crystal.

No matter what the initial state of the time crystal system was, the system’s internal interactions eventually tended toward stabilization — an important indicator that the team had indeed created a discrete time crystal, and which distinguished this experiment from previous studies.

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