Time crystal

Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek at University of Paris-Saclay

The idea of a space-time crystal was first put forward by Frank Wilczek, a professor at MIT and Nobel laureate, in 2012.[4]

In 2013, Xiang Zhang, a nanoengineer at University of California, Berkeley, and his team proposed creating a time crystal in the form of a constantly rotating ring of charged ions.[5]

In response to Wilczek and Zhang, Patrick Bruno, a theorist at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, published several articles in 2013 claiming to show that space-time crystals were impossible. Also later Masaki Oshikawa from the University of Tokyo showed that time crystals would be impossible at their ground state; moreover, he implied that any matter cannot exist in non-equilibrium in its ground state.[6][7]

Subsequent work developed more precise definitions of time translation symmetry-breaking, which ultimately led to a "no-go" proof that quantum time crystals in equilibrium are not possible.[8][1]

Several realizations of time crystals, which avoid the equilibrium no-go arguments, were later proposed.[9] Krzysztof Sacha at Jagiellonian University in Krakow predicted the behaviour of discrete time crystals in a periodically driven system of ultracold atoms.[10] Later works[11] suggested that periodically driven quantum spin systems could show similar behaviour.

Norman Yao at Berkeley studied a different model of time crystals.[12] His ideas were successfully used by two teams: a group led by Harvard's Mikhail Lukin[13] and a group led by Christopher Monroe at University of Maryland.[14]

In 2019 physicists Valerii Kozin and Oleksandr Kyriienko proved that, in theory, a permanent quantum time crystal can exist as an isolated system, if the system contains unusual long-range multiparticle interactions. The original "no-go" argument only holds in the presence of typical short-range fields that decay as quickly as r^−α for some α>0. Kozin and Kyriienko instead analyzed a spin-1/2 many-body Hamiltonian with long-range multispin interactions, and showed it broke continuous time-translational symmetry. Certain spin correlations in the system oscillate in time, despite the system being closed and in a ground energy state. However, demonstrating such a system in practice might be prohibitively difficult.[3][15]

Symmetries in nature lead directly to conservation laws, something which is precisely formulated by the Noether theorem.[16]

The basic idea of time-translation symmetry is that a translation in time has no effect on physical laws, i.e. that the laws of nature that apply today were the same in the past and will be the same in the future.[17] This symmetry implies the conservation of energy.[18]

Broken symmetry in normal crystals

Main articles: Crystal symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking

Normal process (N-process) and Umklapp process (U-process). While the N-process conserves total phonon momentum, the U-process changes phonon momentum.

Normal crystals exhibit broken translation symmetry: they have repeated patterns in space and are not invariant under arbitrary translations or rotations. The laws of physics are unchanged by arbitrary translations and rotations. However, if we hold fixed the atoms of a crystal, the dynamics of an electron or other particle in the crystal depend on how it moves relative to the crystal, and particle momentum can change by interacting with the atoms of a crystal — for example in Umklapp processes.[19] Quasimomentum, however, is conserved in a perfect crystal.[20]

Time crystals show a broken symmetry analogous to a discrete space-translation symmetry breaking. For example, the molecules of a liquid freezing on the surface of a crystal can align with the molecules of the crystal, but with a pattern less symmetric than the crystal: it breaks the initial symmetry. This broken symmetry exhibits three important characteristics:

• the system has a lower symmetry than the underlying arrangement of the crystal,
• the system exhibits spatial and temporal long-range order (unlike a local and intermittent order in a liquid near the surface of a crystal),
• it is the result of interactions between the constituents of the system, which aligns themselves relative to each other.

Time crystals do not violate the laws of thermodynamics: energy in the overall system is conserved, such a crystal does not spontaneously convert thermal energy into mechanical work, and it cannot serve as a perpetual store of work. But it may change perpetually in a fixed pattern in time for as long as the system can be maintained. They possess "motion without energy"[22]—their apparent motion does not represent conventional kinetic energy.[23]

It has been proven that a time crystal cannot exist in thermal equilibrium. Recent years have seen more studies of non-equilibrium quantum fluctuations.[24]

In October 2016, Christopher Monroe at the University of Maryland claimed to have created the world's first discrete time crystal. Using the idea from Yao's proposal, his team trapped a chain of ¹⁷¹Yb⁺ ions in a Paul trap, confined by radio-frequency electromagnetic fields. One of the two spin states was selected by a pair of laser beams. The lasers were pulsed, with the shape of the pulse controlled by an acousto-optic modulator, using the Tukey window to avoid too much energy at the wrong optical frequency. The hyperfine electron states in that setup, ²S_1/2 |F = 0, m_F = 0⟩ and |F = 1, m_F = 0⟩, have very close energy levels, separated by 12.642831 GHz. Ten Doppler-cooled ions were placed in a line 0.025 mm long and coupled together.

The researchers observed a subharmonic oscillation of the drive. The experiment showed "rigidity" of the time crystal, where the oscillation frequency remained unchanged even when the time crystal was perturbed, and that it gained a frequency of its own and vibrated according to it (rather than only the frequency of the drive). However, once the perturbation or frequency of vibration grew too strong, the time crystal "melted" and lost this subharmonic oscillation, and it returned to the same state as before where it moved only with the induced frequency.[14]

Later in 2016, Mikhail Lukin at Harvard also reported the creation of a driven time crystal. His group used a diamond crystal doped with a high concentration of nitrogen-vacancy centers, which have strong dipole–dipole coupling and relatively long-lived spin coherence. This strongly interacting dipolar spin system was driven with microwave fields, and the ensemble spin state was determined with an optical (laser) field. It was observed that the spin polarization evolved at half the frequency of the microwave drive. The oscillations persisted for over 100 cycles. This subharmonic response to the drive frequency is seen as a signature of time-crystalline order.[13]

A similar idea called a choreographic crystal has been proposed.[25]

• Christopher Monroe at University of Maryland
• Frank Wilczek
• Lukin Group at Harvard University
• Norman Yao at Berkeley University