Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real:
In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google's quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine "time crystal." In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.
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.
Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break "time-translation symmetry," 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.
[...] "This is just this completely new and exciting space that we're working in now," said Vedika Khemani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford who co-discovered the novel phase while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper with the Google team.
Journal Reference:
Mi, Xiao, Ippoliti, Matteo, Quintana, Chris, et al. Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor, (DOI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13571)
(Score: 5, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday August 31 2021, @01:04AM (7 children)
No you don't.
And this time I'll proudly admit I didn't read TFA, because I stopped right there: either the guy is serious and he's a crackpot, or it's a trick to get me to read the rest of the article to find out how this outrageous claim can be true, and I don't appreciate sensationalist science writeups designed to sucker me into reading it.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Tuesday August 31 2021, @03:27AM (1 child)
Move along, nothing to see here. It's just a quantum-mechanical state that stays as it is until it decoheres. Is it oscillating? Of course. Just about any quantum-mechanical state oscillates. It used to be called wave mechanics, remember?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 31 2021, @05:54AM
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 31 2021, @03:36AM (4 children)
Yeah, but by rigorously playing with the statistical definitions within the laws of thermodynamics you can end up with negative temperatures. That behave as if they're hotter than infinite temperatures. That's not the regime under which the laws of thermodynamics are designed to work.
The laws of probability don't model the shell game or the stock market either.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 31 2021, @03:08PM (2 children)
Yeah, not so sure about that second one [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday August 31 2021, @04:15PM (1 child)
Got any evidence that E[eps_t.eps_{t+d}] = 0 for small d?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 31 2021, @04:39PM
The answer, as usual, is it depends [sciencedirect.com]:
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday September 27 2021, @04:32PM
Last time I heard, those negative temperatures [wikipedia.org] have actually been observed. It turns out that the temperature scale connects the negative temperatures with the positive ones across infinity, not across zero. Which suggests to me that we should be talking about the reciprocal of temperature rather than about the temperature.