Scientists are continuing to study time crystals, and now a team of researchers has seen the interaction between two time crystals for the first time.
The time crystal is a strange phase of matter that disrupts time transfer symmetry (TTS) and seemed impossible until a few years ago. Ordinary crystals are described by their very regular atomic structure, and atoms repeat themselves in space, but is it possible for crystals to repeat over time? This hypothesis was proposed in 2012, and for the first time in 2016, scientists succeeded in making time crystals.
One of the strange abilities of time crystals is the repetition of motion patterns over time. For example, if you tap the time crystal, it moves slowly for a few seconds and then stops moving, but then starts moving spontaneously again after a while and repeats indefinitely. This is not very familiar to us, yet such a phenomenon does not call into question the laws of thermodynamics.
Scientists have continued to investigate this strange structure, and now a team has made a significant breakthrough in observing the interaction of time crystals. Researchers at Yale, Lancaster, Alto and Royal Holloway Universities in London began their work with superfluid helium-3.
The team reduced the temperature of helium-3 to less than absolute zero and then created two time crystals in the superfluid and connected them. The two time crystals touched each other, and scientists first observed such a phenomenon. These time crystals exchanged particles with each other, resulting in a different pattern of motion known as a sign of a phenomenon known as the “Josephson effect.”
The lead author of this article, “Samuli Autti” stated:
“Controlling the interaction between two time crystals is a remarkable achievement. No one has ever seen two time crystals in a system before, and this is the first time they have interacted. “Communication control is one of the measures that can lead to the practical use of time crystals, such as the processing of quantum information.”
Currently, the biggest problem with quantum computers is the very short operating stability, which, of course, a team of researchers has recently been able to increase this time by 10,000 times. The time crystal can lead to more accurate performance of time-dependent devices such as atomic clocks and systems such as GPS.
