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Time crystals may sound like something from science fiction, having more to do with time travel or Dr. Who. These strange materials--in which atoms and molecules are arranged across space and time--are in fact quite real, and are opening up entirely new ways to think about the nature of matter.
They also eventually may help protect information in futuristic devices known as quantum computers. Two groups of researchers based at Harvard University and the University of Maryland have successfully created time crystals using theories developed at Princeton University. The researchers say this work discovered the essential physics of how time crystals function. This discovery builds on a set of developments that gets at the issue of how we understand complex systems in and out of equilibrium, which is centrally important to how physicists explain the nature of the everyday world.Image credit: E. Edwards/JQI
