A few years back, scientists have long been perplexed whether there exist certain structures that can also have the ability to regularly repeat in time which they have dubbed as time crystals. Now, research papers recently presented by two different groups from the University of Maryland and Harvard University detailing the creation of time crystals, states that the teams have managed to create what looked an awful lot like time crystals which were announced in January of this year. Now, for the first time ever, it seemingly looks like that both experiments have successfully passed the peer-review which puts the 'impossible' phenomenon squarely in the realm of reality.
The World's First 'Time Crystals'
According to reports revealed by IFL Science, researchers from the University of Maryland and Harvard University studies both approached the creation in a different way, although it was found that both teams based on the theoretical background have allegedly been developed at Princeton University by Professor Shivaji Sondhi and Dr Vedika Khemani. Professor Sondhi says that their work has paved the way for the discovery of the essential physics as to how time crystals function. That said, the said discovery is believed to have built on a set of developments at Princeton that gets at the issue of how we understand complex systems in and out of equilibrium, which, in turn, is being regarded as centrally important to how physicists explain the nature of the everyday world.
Meanwhile, in one of his statements reported by Cosmos, Mikhail Lukin, a physicist at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, who also happens to be one of the lead authors of one of the papers, have explained that what's unique about these crystals is that they have properties that repeat over time in a manner analogous to the way the atoms in crystal lattices repeat over space; and although a repeating phenomenon is not much of a big deal anymore since we have the four seasons that takes place every year, Lukin notes that most repeating phenomena are easily altered. Additionally, to understand time crystals deeper, Lukin says that we need to start by considering liquids and gases where molecules are uniformly distributed in a way that makes one point in the liquid or gas basically the same as all other points. It was found that the time crystal created by Lukin's team was a synthetic black diamond, which means that it was a diamond with a million or so "nitrogen vacancy" impurities that are so many that they made it appear black.
The Study's Proposition
Furthermore, both of the research team notes that the crystals in question have nothing to do with time travel but could be considered as a new phase of matter. Chetan Nayak, the principal researcher at Microsoft's Station Q and a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara claims that one possibility that it might be put to use is on futuristic quantum computers that will be potentially useful for quantum information processing.
