Finally, the dream has become a reality.
Scientists have just created something like a perpetual motion machine that forever cycles between states without consuming energy.
This may sound incredible, but it’s true. They also gave it a name… the time crystal.
Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer. Believe it or not, this time crystal flips back and forth between two states without burning energy.
How could this even be possible?
On Thursday the 29th of July, researchers at Google and physicists at Stanford, Princeton, and other universities said they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.”
This is a novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years. The time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.
The significance of this discovery is amazing — it simply eludes the second law of thermodynamics… That’s the law that says disorder always increases.
Time crystals are also the first objects to break the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.
The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium. Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don’t change with time. The time crystal is the first “out-of-equilibrium” phase. It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state.
If this time crystal is real, it would be the newest and most exciting object that physicists have ever created.
If real, this time crystal would exemplify everything unimaginable… a quantum object that nature itself would have probably never created, given its complex combination of delicate ingredients. Imaginations conjured the recipe, stirred by nature’s most baffling laws.
It’s an Impossible Idea becoming possible.
But how could such unusual, and special thing become useful?
According to its creators, the time crystal is different from, say, a wall clock — an object that also undergoes periodic motion. Clock hands burn energy and stop when the battery runs out. The time crystal, on the other hand, requires no input and continues indefinitely.
If it sounds implausible to you, that’s because it is. But it would have never been possible without a quantum computer. And Google’s quantum computer was the perfect match for it.
It’s been said that this super-computer had completed in 2019 a task in 200 seconds that would take a conventional computer 10,000 years. Quantum computers aren’t the next generation of supercomputers — they’re something entirely different.
Before we can even begin to talk about their potential applications, we need to understand the fundamental physics that drives the theory of quantum computing. Quantum computers consist of “qubits” or controllable quantum particles, each of which can maintain two possible states, labeled 0 and 1, at the same time. When qubits interact, they can collectively juggle an exponential number of simultaneous possibilities, enabling computing advantages. Google’s qubits consist of superconducting aluminum strips. Each has two possible energy states, which can be programmed to represent spins pointing up or down. For the experiment, the creators used a chip with 20 qubits to serve as the time crystal.
On July 5, another team based at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they built a time crystal not in a quantum processor, but out of the nuclear spins of carbon atoms in a diamond. The Delft system is smaller and more limited than the time crystal realized in Google’s quantum processor.
It’s unclear how both time crystals will be put to practical use. But its stability seems promising.
Something that’s as stable as this is unusual, and special things can become useful.
Watch this video to find out more.
#innovation #science #nasa #space #earth #ai #artificialintelligence #deeplearning #energy #video #like #climatechange #timecrystal #time #crystal #lawsofphysics #thermodynamics
