Quanta Magazine reports on the creation – using a cutting-edge quantum computer – of something very close to a perpetual-motion machine, a kind of matter that changes between phases without ever losing any energy:
A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.
“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That’s the law that says disorder always increases.
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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.
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With yesterday’s preprint, which has been submitted for publication, and other recent results, researchers have fulfilled the original hope for quantum computers. In his 1982 paper proposing the devices, the physicist Richard Feynman argued that they could be used to simulate the particles of any imaginable quantum system.
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The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek conceived the idea in 2012, while teaching a class about ordinary (spatial) crystals. “If you think about crystals in space, it’s very natural also to think about the classification of crystalline behavior in time,” he told this magazine not long after.
Consider a diamond, a crystalline phase of a clump of carbon atoms. The clump is governed by the same equations everywhere in space, yet it takes a form that has periodic spatial variations, with atoms positioned at lattice points. Physicists say that it “spontaneously breaks space-translation symmetry.” Only minimum-energy equilibrium states spontaneously break spatial symmetries in this way.
Wilczek envisioned a multi-part object in equilibrium, much like a diamond. But this object breaks time-translation symmetry: It undergoes periodic motion, returning to its initial configuration at regular intervals.
Wilczek’s proposed time crystal was profoundly different from, say, a wall clock — an object that also undergoes periodic motion. Clock hands burn energy and stop when the battery runs out. A Wilczekian time crystal requires no input and continues indefinitely, since the system is in its ultra-stable equilibrium state.
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Quantum computers consist of “qubits” — essentially 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 demo, [Google’s Kostya] Kechedzhi and collaborators used a chip with 20 qubits to serve as the time crystal.
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On July 5, a team based at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands reported that they built a Floquet 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 whether a Floquet time crystal might have practical use. But its stability seems promising to Moessner. “Something that’s as stable as this is unusual, and special things become useful,” he said.
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You can read the pre-print research here, at arXiv.org.