Time Traveller Guide

A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

Paper abstract – Robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system:

Abstract
Crystals spontaneously break the continuous translation symmetry of free space. Analogously, time crystals lift translational invariance in time. Here we demonstrate a robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system of a semiconductor tailored by tuning the material composition. Continuous, time-independent external driving of the sample produces periodic auto-oscillations with a coherence time exceeding hours. Varying the experimental parameters reveals wide ranges in which the time crystal remains stable. At the edges of these ranges, we find chaotic behaviour with a lifted periodicity corresponding to the melting of the crystal. The time crystal state enables fundamental studies of nonlinear interactions and has potential applications as a precise on-chip frequency standard.