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Ugh, that title though... WTH is a time crystal, and who decided to call it that? I'm not clicking the bait to find out.
The core idea is not too strange, actually. A "normal" crystal has a repeating structure in space; a time crystal is a construct with a repeating temporal structure.
Edit: have just looked it up. Looks like it's basically 3-D structure with repeated motion over time.
Ugh, that title though... WTH is a time crystal, and who decided to call it that? I'm not clicking the bait to find out.
The core idea is not too strange, actually. A "normal" crystal has a repeating structure in space; a time crystal is a construct with a repeating temporal structure.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/426917/physicists-predict...
""" Another is the possibility that it may be possible to exploit time crystals to perform computations using zero energy. As Wilczek puts it, “it is interesting to speculate that a…quantum mechanical system whose states could be interpreted as a collection of qubits, could be engineered to traverse a programmed landscape of structured states in Hilbert space over time.” """
I'm definitely too dumb for this.
[1] Back to the future (1985) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/
So a time crystal appears to be made up of real matter. The article mentions ions that are arranged in a certain particular way, cooled in order to reduce their energy, and this still makes sense so far.
So, the idea is to create a closed loop of sorts from a temporal perspective. I'm imagining an object as a set of states that the object can be observed in, and if there was a loop, it'd be possible to observe a certain sequence of states over and over.
The arrangement of the ions is important, and one of the properties is the spin, which is possible to change with a laser beam, because obviously.
Anyways, I guess the frequency of the oscillation of the ions changing spin, since they interact with each other in a domino fashion, can be controlled with the frequency of the laser.
They did this, and observed the ions changing in such a way where there was no driving influence and it's implied that the reason that this behavior was observed is because time symmetry was broken, which is just a fancy way of alleging that the universe is non-deterministic, I think.
Maybe this will eventually be useful?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The core idea is not too strange, actually. A "normal" crystal has a repeating structure in space; a time crystal is a construct with a repeating temporal structure.
Does that mean it is continuously changing in a repetitive fashion?
I don't know anything about anything, but I want to enumerate some things I learned reading this article, and if someone actually knows what they're talking about and sees fit to take pity on me, please correct me so that I can understand what this actually means. So a time crystal appears to be made up of real matter. The article mentions ions that are arranged in a certain particular way, cooled in order to reduce…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The core idea is not too strange, actually. A "normal" crystal has a repeating structure in space; a time crystal is a construct with a repeating temporal structure.
Does that mean it is continuously changing in a repetitive fashion?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that mean it is continuously changing in a repetitive fashion?
apparently yes, but because it's in a low energy state, it's impossible to extract any energy from it and do work (otherwise it would be a perpetual motion machine.)