.jpg?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp)
Time crystal evades the second law of thermodynamics, Thanos style
People call it a breakthrough, a new phase of matter-the time crystal invented by Google that makes the science and technology scene daze. No, we are not talking about one of the six physical defiant stones that escape Thanos’s control. This is actual science, which obviously violates our current understanding of physics.
This is a discovery that can bring us closer to the most accurate and powerful Atomic clocks, gyroscopes and magnetometers to date, But this is just the icing on the cake. Who knows what other practical applications are there for discoveries of this scale.
In Google’s Sycamore quantum processor, strange things are happening. As the theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek put forward nine years ago, a new state of matter has been realized. By blasting superconducting aluminum strips with microwaves, the system’s qubits—encoding 1 and 0 in quantum computing—are placed in a kind of perpetual motion machine.
A sort of report From Cornell University, named Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor, pointed out that “We have demonstrated the characteristic spatiotemporal response of DTC to the general initial state. Our work uses a time reversal protocol to combine external decoherence with internal Thermalization is distinguished from the use of quantum typicality to circumvent the exponential cost of densely sampled feature spectra.”
More simply: “It’s just a flip-flop,” explained Bournemouth physicist Curt von Keyserlingk. “It didn’t look random in the end, it just got stuck. As if it remembered the original look, it would repeat this pattern over time.”
This basically means that it is time to rethink the second law of thermodynamics. The second law basically states that entropy (or disorder) always increases. This is why the perpetual motion machine has not been invented, at least, maybe until now.
With Living science, Loughborough physicist Achilleas Lazarides (who was part of the original theoretical discovery) described the time crystal as a constantly oscillating pendulum. The second law states: “Even if you completely isolate the pendulum from the universe, without friction and air resistance, it will eventually stop.” This kind of “heating” does not occur in the case of time crystals.
“Energy starts to concentrate on the center of mass of the pendulum, but all these internal degrees of freedom-like the way atoms vibrate inside a rod-will eventually be transferred to.”
In the end, the discovery of time crystals can be transformed into the supreme quantum computing technology. At least for now, although the researchers are in the early stages of the experiment, it seems to point to some insights into the workings of the universe. However, it is not specific at this point, and quantum physics is not an easy thing to explain, let alone research-remember this.
Now I am very eager to play “BioShock: Infinite”.