Discovered a new kind of matter: "The Time Crystal"
Good evening to all :) Today we'll talk about a fascinating thing, and that seemed almost impossible.. until now. It seems out of a science fiction movie, directly from one of the time travel, but it is a real object: a crystal whose regular structure repeats itself both in space and in time.
The temporal crystal had been theorized in 2012 by the Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek and now that hypothesis has been realized in the University of Maryland, by the group of Christopher Monroe. This man with his team, working on some ytterbium crystals, managed to create the conditions for which they began to oscillate. The ions of ytterbium were hit with two laser beams and brought by scientists in a state of instability: they entered a sort of repeated and constant oscillation, turning into time crystals.
The ions of ytterbium were hit with two laser beams and brought by scientists in a state of instability: they entered a sort of repeated and constant oscillation, turning into time crystals. Periodicity means that they function like natural clocks.
So far the only real crystals were those whose structure is made up of lattices of ordered atoms that are repeated equal to themselves in space. The Nobel Wilczek questioned the possibility of constructing crystals with similar characteristics over time, that is, repeating themselves equal to themselves after a fixed interval of time. According to the researchers, the one reached in this experimentation is a new state of matter. The state is quasi-equilibrium. The fundamental state should be of absolute equilibrium, instead these crystals still manage to "get excited" without however needing to absorb energy to do it. It is not a matter of perpetual motion, but of particular phenomena that make matter in its quantum states.
Let me know your opinion about this,
Musclenerd ;)