10 Facts About Time crystal

In condensed matter physics, a time crystal is a quantum system of particles whose lowest-energy state is one in which the particles are in repetitive motion.

Idea of a quantized time crystal was theorized in 2012 by Frank Wilczek, a Nobel laureate and professor at MIT.

The researchers used a Bose–Einstein condensate strongly coupled to a dissipative optical cavity and the time crystal was demonstrated to spontaneously break discrete time translation symmetry by periodically switching between two atomic density patterns.

In 2019 physicists Valerii Kozin and Oleksandr Kyriienko proved that, in theory, a permanent quantum time crystal can exist as an isolated system if the system contains unusual long-range multiparticle interactions.

In 2022, the Hamburg research team, supervised by Hans Keßler and Andreas Hemmerich, demonstrated, for the first time, a continuous dissipative time crystal exhibiting spontaneous breaking of continuous time-translation symmetry.

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The experiment showed "rigidity" of the time crystal, where the oscillation frequency remained unchanged even when the time crystal was perturbed, and that it gained a frequency of its own and vibrated according to it .

However, once the perturbation or frequency of vibration grew too strong, the time crystal "melted" and lost this subharmonic oscillation, and it returned to the same state as before where it moved only with the induced frequency.

Time crystal's group used a diamond crystal doped with a high concentration of nitrogen-vacancy centers, which have strong dipole–dipole coupling and relatively long-lived spin coherence.

In February 2021 a team at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems described the creation of time crystal consisting of magnons and probed them under scanning transmission X-ray microscopy to capture the recurring periodic magnetization structure in the first known video record of such type.

In June 2022 the observation of a continuous time crystal was reported by a team at the Institute of Laser Physics at the University of Hamburg, supervised by Hans Keßler and Andreas Hemmerich.