Gizmodo
By Isaac Schultz – February 6, 2024
A team of physicists in Germany managed to create a time crystal that demonstrably lasts 40 minutes—10 million times longer than other known crystals—and could persist for even longer.
Ordinary crystals, by which I mean crystals in macro-scale space, are solids whose atoms are arranged in a highly organized pattern. Diamonds, snowflakes, and table salts are all crystalline. Time crystals are structures whose lowest-energy states have highly ordered patterns (periodicity) in space and time. Time crystals were predicted to also have their properties suddenly change at a given time, even without some external factors inducing such a change.