Google researchers just published A study on the ArXiv server, claiming they created physics-defying “Time Crystals” or “Time Crystals” using the company’s Sycamore quantum computer, and frankly, it’s impossible to say how important this could be. discovery.
A time crystal is stable and in a continuous flow, with definable states that repeat at predictable intervals without losing energy. In other words, these “crystals” avoid one of the most important laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the disturbance or entropy of an isolated system must always increase. They remain stable, resisting any random dissolution, despite being in a constant state of change.
Well, these crystals are not necessarily new, they were intuited by the Nobel Prize in Physics, Frank Wilczek, in 2012.
“It was a huge surprise,” said Curt von Keyserlingk, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the UK who was not involved in the study. “If you asked someone 30, 20 or maybe even 10 years ago, they wouldn’t have expected it.”
If you can’t find something in nature, it doesn’t mean it can’t exist.
Basically, a time crystal is like a pendulum that never stops swinging.
“Even if you completely isolate a pendulum from the universe, so there is no friction or air resistance, it will eventually stop. And that’s because of the second law of thermodynamics, “said Achilleas Lazarides, a physicist at Loughborough University in the UK, who was one of the scientists who first discovered the theoretical possibility of the new stage in 2015.
The theoretical novelty of the crystals is in some respects a double-edged sword, as physicists are currently scrambling to find ways to use them, although von Keyserlingk has suggested that they could be used as high-precision sensors. Other proposals include the use of crystals for better memory storage or for the development of quantum computers with even faster processing power.
But the biggest use for time crystals may already be here. These could allow scientists to investigate the limits of quantum mechanics.
“It allows you not only to study what happens in nature, but also to design and observe what quantum mechanics It allows you to do what you don’t do, ”Lazarides said.
“If you can’t find something in nature, it doesn’t mean it can’t exist, because we just created one of these things,” he added.
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