Diamonds, snowflakes, and table salts are all crystalline.
Time crystals are structures whose lowest-energy states have highly ordered patterns (periodicity) in space and time.
Time crystals change on a metaphysical whim, regardless of when they are.
A measurement of the new time crystal, with each point corresponding to an experimental value.Image: Alex Gerilich/TU Dortmund
The recent team of physicists managed to make a time crystal that lasted superlatively long: 40 minutes.
Their research waspublishedlast week in Nature Physics.
Firstproposed in 2012, time crystals have been crafted in lab prefs since.
But that time crystal only lasted a few milliseconds.
Again: the recent crystal lasted 40 minutes, and the team believes it could live even longer.
The new time crystal is in an electron-nuclear spin system.
The team excited the material with polarized laser light, polarizing the spins of the nuclei in the system.
The time crystal wasnt perfect.
In other words, theres plenty more physics where that came from, so buckle your quantum seatbelt.
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