A German-Polish collaboration successfully made the first video recording of a space-time crystal. The repeated structure of the material was micrometer-sized and at room temperature, representing an important step forward in finding applications for these intriguing objects.
A crystal is by definition a material whose constituents are arranged in a lattice, a highly ordered microscopic structure. A time crystal is the same, but the order is not seen in space, but in time. The structure changes and oscillates, periodically returning to a specific configuration.
Put the two together and you have a space-time crystal. The crystal in this study was created using a strip of permalloy (an iron-nickel alloy) and placed in a small antenna through which they sent a radio-frequency current.
This process produced specific excited states in the electrons of this material. These behave like a particle (even though they are not one) so they are called quasi-magnon particles. The magnons in this material can be seen going in and out of their arrangement periodically in both space and time: a quintessential space-time crystal.
“We were able to show that such space-time crystals are much stronger and more widespread than previously thought,” co-author Pawel Gruszecki, a scientist at the Faculty of Physics of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, said in a statement . “Our crystal condenses at room temperature and particles can interact with it – unlike an isolated system. Moreover, it has reached a size that can be used to do something with this magnonic space-time crystal. This can result in many possible applications.”
What was extremely exciting was that their space-time crystal is capable of interacting with other magnons thrown into the system by the researchers. Two time crystals were recently created that interact, but this is the first time we are looking at the interaction of quasi-particles with a space-time crystal.
“We took the regularly repeating pattern of magnons in space and time, sent more magnons in, and they eventually dissipated. So we were able to show that the time crystal can interact with other quasiparticles. No one has have yet to be able to show this directly in an experiment, let alone in a video,” explained other co-lead author Nick Träger, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
Crystals are useful in a wide range of technologies, so there is a lot of interest in how time crystal structures can be used for communication or imaging technologies.
The study was published in Physical review papers.
An earlier version of this article was published in February 2021.
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