Google creates `time crystal'

Time crystals sound like majestic objects from science fiction movies that unlock passageways to alternate universes. In the Marvel universe, “time stones” gives wielders control over the past, present, and future.

While that remains a fantasy, scientists have successfully created micro-scale time crystals for years — not for powering intergalactic spaceships, but for energizing ultrapowerful computers.

“Time crystals are like a rest stop on the road to building a quantum computer,” said Norman Yao, a molecular physicist at the University of California, Berkley.

It's an area of interest for Google, which, along with physicists at Stanford and Princeton universities, claim to have developed a “scalable approach” to time crystal creation using the company's Sycamore quantum computer.

In a paper published last month on the research-sharing platform Arxviv.org, a team of over 100 scientists describe how they set up an array of 20 quantum particles, or qubits, to serve as a time crystal. During experiments, they applied algorithms that spun the qubits upward and downward, generating a controllable reaction that could be sustained “for infinitely long times,” according to the paper.

Time crystals are scientific oddities made of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern in space. This design enables them to shapeshift over time without losing energy or overheating. Since time crystals continuously evolve and don't seem to require much energy input, they may be useful for quantum computers, which rely on extremely fragile qubits that are prone to decay.

Quantum computing is weighed down by hard-tocontrol qubits, which are error prone and often die. Time crystals might introduce a better method for sustaining quantum computing, according to Yao, who published a blueprint for making time crystals in 2017.

The scientists involved in the Google's research say they can't discuss their findings as they undergo peer review.

However, the work tackles an area where physicists have long hoped for a breakthrough.

“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” Roderich Moessner, a co-author on the Google paper, told Quanta Magazine.

The time crystal concept was first proposed in 2012 by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek, who questioned if atoms could be arranged in time similarly to how they are arranged in ordinary crystals.