Physicists at Washington University have forged ahead in the field of quantum mechanics by creating a new phase of matter known as “time crystals” and the even more advanced “time quasicrystals.”
These groundbreaking materials defy traditional physics by maintaining perpetual motion and could revolutionize quantum computing and precision timekeeping by providing a stable, energy-conserving method of measuring time and storing quantum information.
Time Crystals
Physicists at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) have created a new kind of time crystal, a unique phase of matter that challenges conventional understanding of motion and time.
The research team includes Kater Murch, the Charles M. Hohenberg Professor of Physics, and Chong Zu, an assistant professor of physics, along with graduate students Guanghui He, Ruotian “Reginald” Gong, Changyu Yao, and Zhongyuan Liu. Additional collaborators include Bingtian Ye from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Norman Yao from Harvard University. Their findings were published on March 12 in Physical Review X, a leading journal in the field.
In a discussion with The Ampersand, Zu, He, and Ye shared insights into their breakthrough and what it means for the future of quantum science.
What Is a Time Crystal?
To understand a time crystal, it helps to think about familiar crystals such as diamonds or quartz. Those minerals owe their shape and shine to their highly organized structures. The carbon atoms in a diamond interact with each other to form repeated, predictable patterns.
Much like the atoms in a normal crystal repeat patterns in space, the particles in a time crystal repeat patterns over time, Zu explained. In other words, they vibrate or “tick” at constant frequencies, making them crystalized in four dimensions: the three physical dimensions plus the dimension of time.
Unique Properties and Creation of Time Crystals
Time crystals are like a clock that never needs winding or batteries. “In theory, it should be able to go on forever,” Zu said. In practice, time crystals are fragile and sensitive to the environment. “We were able to observe hundreds of cycles in our crystals before they broke down, which is impressive.”
Time crystals have been around for a little while; the first one was created at the University of Maryland in 2016. The WashU-led team has gone one step further to build something even more incredible: a time quasicrystal. “It’s an entirely new phase of matter,” Zu said.
Time Quasicrystals
In material science, quasicrystals are recently discovered substances that are highly organized even though their atoms don’t follow the same patterns in every dimension. In the same way, the different dimensions of time quasicrystals vibrate at different frequencies, explained He, the lead author of the paper. The rhythms are very precise and highly organized, but it’s more like a chord than a single note. “We believe we are the first group to create a true time quasicrystal,” He said.
Fabrication and Applications of Time Quasicrystals
The team built their quasicrystals inside a small, millimeter-sized chunk of diamond. They then bombarded the diamond with beams of nitrogen that were powerful enough to knock out carbon atoms, leaving atom-sized blank spaces. Electrons move into those spaces, and each electron has quantum-level interactions with its neighbors. Zu and colleagues used a similar approach to build a quantum diamond microscope.
The time quasicrystals are made up of more than a million of these vacancies in the diamond. Each quasicrystal is roughly one micrometer (one-thousandth of a millimeter) across, which is too small to be seen without a microscope. “We used microwave pulses to start the rhythms in the time quasicrystals,” Ye said. “The microwaves help create order in time.”
Potential Uses and Future of Time Crystals and Quasicrystals
The mere existence of time crystals and quasicrystals confirms some basic theories of quantum mechanics, so they’re useful in that way, Zu said. But they might have practical applications as well. Because they are sensitive to quantum forces such as magnetism, time crystals could be used as long-lasting quantum sensors that never need to be recharged.
Time crystals also offer a novel route to precision timekeeping. Quartz crystal oscillators in watches and electronics tend to drift and require calibration. A time crystal, by contrast, could maintain a consistent tick with minimal loss of energy. A time quasicrystal sensor could potentially measure multiple frequencies at once, creating a fuller picture of the lifetime of a quantum material. First, researchers would need to better understand how to read and track the signal. They can’t yet precisely tell time with a time crystal; they can only make it tick.
Because time crystals can theoretically tick forever without losing energy, there’s a lot of interest in harnessing their power for quantum computers. “They could store quantum memory over long periods of time, essentially like a quantum analog of RAM,” Zu said. “We’re a long way from that sort of technology, but creating a time quasicrystal is a crucial first step.”
Reference: “Experimental Realization of Discrete Time Quasicrystals” by Guanghui He, Bingtian Ye, Ruotian Gong, Changyu Yao, Zhongyuan Liu, Kater W. Murch, Norman Y. Yao and Chong Zu, 12 March 2025, Physical Review X.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.15.011055
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16 Comments
Sure thing, buddy…
Maybe we should look for some dilithium crystals
Time is demonstrably abstract. You can’t bend an abstract. Whoever wrote this does not know what Time actually is.
http://Www.time-defined.com
I completely agree and there is nothing here that makes sense. I think they are angling for awards and Novels and making grandiose statements.
If it is an abstract how does gravity dilate the observation of time. It isn’t abstract at all. Your understanding of time is. It’s a concrete thing that we have little understanding of how it works similar to gravity. Is height abstract? Is depth? Time is the 4th dimension. This idea that it’s a concept we created is silly. Do you know the amount of time a quartz crystal vibrates for? It is scientifically precise every time electricity passes through to the microsecond. That sounds like a conceptual thing right? We humans definitely were around in the primordial soup phase of earth creating quartz seeds to mimic our yet to be invented concept of time. Sounds right right?
Plasma chamber to keep matter and antimatter apart.
That’s hilarious love star trek
Live long and prosper đź––
very good congratulations my compliments and thank you for you’re research ,đź‘Ť
Some of the biggest waffle published lately. Why not frame the research in realistic terms and not exaggerated statements of grandeur and nonsense? Impressive chemistry doesn’t mean you made wormholes inside your crystals and bent “spacetime” and trapped it like it is material. What a lot of rubbish written in this article! Cosmology in crisis, truly.
What is fascinating about many articles summarised by SciTech Daily is the prominent number of Chinese scientists involved. The same applies to good number of papers in my own field.
And King Donald is about to wreck the USA’s not overly wonderful public education system. I suppose well educated, and indeed adequately and nutritiously fed children, are a drag on the USA.
I know that back under the evils of socialist Britain, before Thatcher saved us from the clutches of the Devil, the Conservative governments of the UK (as well as the less common Labour governments) not only enabled subsidised school meals for every school-child, not to mention 200ml of milk every day to prevent our suffering from rickets, but also supported us through tuition-fee paid studies at university and enabled us to have cost-of-living grants so that we could focus on our studies without having to work for a living whilst at university.
I remember living under the thatcher rageme, and the social and economic deprivation it exposed me and my parents to , Margaret thatcher despised the British working class, like it was some kinde of pestilence , socializim is not a disease, but monatarisim is , thatcher was like a wreking ball on the hole country, shutting down all the Cole mines , selling of all the finanshaly viable industries , and leaving nothing but , devastation in her wake , that’s why my parents decided to move to Canada, to escape the political turmoil, thee political scull dugery , the violence .
Time is more like a hum than a tick , time still exists between the ticks . time is fluid , solid , gasish , stacked , graphic , expansive , self creating , historical . In the reading they use light to create a cavity that is filled with an electron hence the observation seen is the breaking down of a photon , time is an ingredient in everything , observable but only tangible as an ingredient .
Ever think that time as we measure it is only relevant on Earth.
Its most likely that time exists individually within each atom, the faster the internal atom moves the faster time goes, Thats why in black holes time moves slower, because of the high amount of gravity, atoms cant internally move as quickly and time goes slower.
But still, this is very strange article, and i dont see how it proves a fourth dimension would even exist.
Clever title – exaggerated, but clever.