The Crystal That Can Bend Time

Time crystals, originally proposed by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek in 2012, have now been successfully created using Rydberg atoms and laser light at Tsinghua University in China, with theoretical support from TU Wien in Austria. This new state of matter does not repeat in space like traditional crystals, but in time, displaying spontaneous periodic rhythms without an external stimulus, a phenomenon known as spontaneous symmetry breaking.

A crystal is an arrangement of atoms that repeats itself in space, in regular intervals: At every point, the crystal looks exactly the same. In 2012, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek raised the question: Could there also be a time crystal – an object that repeats itself not in space but in time? And could it be possible that a periodic rhythm emerges, even though no specific rhythm is imposed on the system and the interaction between the particles is completely independent of time?