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Re:Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible... by akomtu on Friday June 17, 2022 @07:59PM (#31786017)
I don't get why it's surprising. Any regular structure has resonance modes: struck a bridge or a violin and it will keep vibrating in a time-periodic fashion. Most structures are leaky and lose that initial energy quickly. Crystals are super-regular, nearly perfect macroscopic structures, so they lose energy slowly, and if the periodic motion only involves electrons in the crystal, the motion will conserve energy almost perfectly and may keep going for billions of years.
Re:Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible... by raattgift on Friday June 17, 2022 @08:18PM (#31786152)
> struck [strike]

Energy in.

> will keep vibrating ... lose energy slowly

Dissipative process: energy out. Eventually stop vibrating.

Time crystals cycle through their configurations until you put energy in. Otherwise, they are in lowest energy state, so no energy out. Ever.

Re:Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible... by philipov on Friday June 17, 2022 @08:33PM (#31786227)
Practically speaking, this means we couldn't use the cyclic process to do work, because that would require it to have excess energy it could transfer. If a time crystal's periodic behavior were to spin, you couldn't use the rotation to push something. Right?
Re:Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible... by raattgift on Friday June 17, 2022 @09:28PM (#31786523)
Right. Lowest-energy means that you can't pull energy out of a time crystal; there's no excess. Anything you try to attach to a time crystal will transfer energy into the crystal.

Practically all we can do with a time crystal is to measure it with the lightest possible touch and hope it doesn't break the periodicity. (So far, afaik, the periodicity has always been broken by the measurement process's energy input).

I don't know what we could do with large numbers of time crystals, though. One can't pick up a snowflake in one's bare hands and use it like a buzz saw to cut a sheet of paper (the snowflake melts on contact), but an avalanche of snowflakes can snap trees. Maybe for time crystals that rotate light a predictable amount at a given time t_x, we could create some sort of interesting lens from a large cloud of such time crystals arranged at different distances from a bright light source -- a sort of "anti-fog".

Re:Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible... by rpz on Saturday June 18, 2022 @07:58AM (#31789080)
If the periodicity is broken by any measurement we have been able to make so far then how do we know the periodicity is there in the first place? Just theory? If it’s not too much of a burden could you outline the proof of the existence of time crystals?
Re:Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible... by raattgift on Saturday June 18, 2022 @10:43AM (#31790221)
> how do we know the periodicity is there ... Just theory?

Theory guides us, but experimentally you can for example make a whole bunch of time crystals (especially straightfoward for driven time crystals, which have a period that's an integer multiple of the driver, the driving force being laser light or microwaves) with an expected set of states it cycles through, and you can test those states once per time crystal. If you reliably get the states theory predicts, that's good evidence.

> could you outline the proof of the existence

The excellent <https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/5> and decent <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal#Experiments> (the former is [5] in that wikipedia article) are good starting points, with ample references.

Re:Physicists link two time crystals in seemingly impossible... by ffhhj on Friday June 17, 2022 @11:38PM (#31787069)
Great explanations, thanks!

This reminds me of the anti-zeno effect, in which a particle evolution is increasingly delayed with more frequent observations.