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Re:Time crystals might exist after all by wyager on Sunday September 11, 2016 @01:45PM (#12474561)
The other responses have not addressed the possibility that you are referring to a quantum harmonic oscillator. If you are, that is a very good question. I believe the resolution here is that while the phase of a quantum harmonic oscillator in the ground state changes with time, the results of bracketing any hermitian operator (i.e. measuring a physical quantity) does not change throughout time. Therefore in the ground state of the quantum harmonic oscillator, the system is time translation invariant. So a quantum harmonic oscillator does not form a time crystal.
Re:Time crystals might exist after all by lisper on Sunday September 11, 2016 @01:51PM (#12474600)
Well, yeah, I thought it was a given that we're in quantum-land here. In classical physics the lowest energy state of a system is necessarily static.