Science has captured a moment of time inside ‘unbalanced’ crystals

Time crystals — where atoms resonate in a perpetual loop without losing energy — appear to have been created in the laboratory.

SCIENCE has captured time. And it’s not just a Dr Who publicity stunt. A new type of crystal traps atoms in an infinite loop — pulsing eternally without losing energy.

Yes: a perpetual motion machine.

And the only way the laws of thermodynamics — which define how much energy exists and how it deteriorates — can be defied is by suspending time itself.

This is what two new experiments appear to have achieved.

Researchers have published their results in the latest edition of the science journal Nature.

“We have found a new phase of matter,” said theoretical physics graduate student at Harvard University and study co-author Soonwon Choi.

“It’s something moving in time while still stable.”

Why should we care? It provides the possibility of making ultra-fast quantum computers stable enough to be useful.

BROKEN TIMELINE

Common crystals such as diamonds or ice are made up of atomic chains that spontaneously sort themselves into a neat but assymetric structural pattern.

A time crystal is an exotic state of matter. It has an atomic structure which stretches atoms apart while still allowing them to interact with each other.

This assymetric structure still repeats itself in space.

But it also repeats in time.

Stir the atoms up with a laser pulse set at a certain frequency, and the atoms start behaving oddly. They move in patterns through the repeating lattices, vibrating without generating heat or displaying entropy — the ever-increasing state of disorder that controls our universe.

The assymetric vibrations repeat themselves, perpetually.

This fractures the symmetry of time.

Time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they're not: https://t.co/OYxRquUHzQ pic.twitter.com/RuLGeq2zlG

— Nature News&Comment (@NatureNews) March 8, 2017

An analogy is striking a bell. It will ring out loudly, and then slowly fade.

A time crystal would ring eternally.

But it gets weirder than that.

Berkeley University’s Norman Yao, who theorised the structure of these crystals, says it was __like poking a tub of jelly — only to see it react later.

“Wouldn’t it be super weird if you jiggled the Jell-O and found that somehow it responded at a different period?” Yao said in a statement.

“But that is the essence of the time crystal.”

Entropy requires time to exist. And entropy — __like time — only goes in one direction.

So something is happening at a level below our universe — down among the bizarre subatomic world of quantum mechanics.

MIND-BENDING PHYSICS

The details are complex. But the Harvard University researchers balanced nitrogen and carbon atoms inside a crystal lattice.

The outcome was, to all appearances, a black diamond.

But the size difference between nitrogen and carbon atoms created patches of empty space between them. Called vacancies, these spaces were pulsed with lasers which caused the nitrogen atoms to vibrate.

Combined with the lattice-like structure of the crystal, this created a looped resonance that wouldn’t go away.

University of Maryland researchers produced a similar effect by trapping and manipulating ytterbium ions in lasers.

Despite all the energy of the lasers, the ions did not heat up.

Thermodynamics was suspended.

Berkeley University’s Norman Yao, who theorised the structure of these crystals, says the crystals are inherently out of equilibrium — unable to reach a state of rest.

“This is a new phase of matter, period, but it is also really cool because it is one of the first examples of non-equilibrium matter,” Yao said in a statement.

“For the last half-century, we have been exploring equilibrium matter, like metals and insulators. We are just now starting to explore a whole new landscape of non-equilibrium matter.”

What would this matter be like?

Princeton Professor of Physics Shivaji Sondhi compared the driving of the quantum system to squeezing periodically on a sponge.

“When you release the sponge, you expect it to resume its shape. Imagine now that it only resumes its shape after every second squeeze even though you are applying the same force each time. That is what our system does,” he said.