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November 27, 2019 06:06 pm

Back To the Future: the Original Time Crystal Makes a Comeback

sciencehabit writes: Like vinyl records, the strange concept of a time crystal is spinning back into fashion. In 2012, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist proposed that the properties of a system of quantum particles might cycle in time much as a crystal's pattern of atoms repeats in space, even without the addition of energy, making it a bit like perpetual motion machine. But others soon proved a "no-go theorem" that said such a thing was impossible -- and replaced it with a less fantastical definition of a time crystal that researchers soon demonstrated in the lab. But now, two physicists have shown that the original notion of a time crystal is possible after all -- at least in theory. "I think it's right," says Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who dreamed up time crystals but who was not involved with the new work. The new scheme is "one way of getting around the 'no-go.'" But realizing the system experimentally may be exceedingly difficult, other physicists say. In physics, patterns can arise seemingly out of nowhere. For example, in a crystalline solid, the forces between atoms do not explicitly specify the position of the atoms or the distances between them. Cool the atoms into their ground state, however, and they nestle into a repeating pattern like the squares on a checkerboard.

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