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MATERIAL WITNESS

Quantum time crystals open up

Nature Materials volume 20, page 1172 (2021)Cite this article

Time crystals are a temporal analogue of ordinary ‘space’ crystals: many-body systems that are periodic not in space but in time. They evolve dynamically in a way that regularly returns to a particular configuration.

But if the driving is periodic in the first place, isn’t periodic dynamics inevitable? Yes — but it qualifies as time-crystal behaviour when that periodicity is self-organized at a different, lower frequency than the driving (that is, subharmonic). This response — a characteristic of so-called discrete time crystals — seems possible in principle, but then there’s another problem. Such a driven system would steadily absorb energy, getting hotter without limit until its dynamics are eventually swamped by thermal motion. So a time crystal like this would not be stable indefinitely.

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  1. Nature Materials https://www.nature.com/naturematerials

    Philip Ball

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  1. Philip Ball
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Correspondence to Philip Ball.

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Ball, P. Quantum time crystals open up. Nat. Mater. 20, 1172 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01090-4

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