Google’s quantum computing team made headlines in 2019 when they performed the first-ever computation that ordinary computers weren’t thought to be able to do in a practical amount of time. “There are good reasons to think that none of those experiments completely succeeded, and a quantum computer like would be particularly well placed to do much better than those earlier experiments,” said John Chalker, a condensed matter physicist at the University of Oxford who wasn’t involved in the new work. Researchers have raced to create a time crystal over the past five years, but previous demos, though successful on their own terms, have failed to satisfy all the criteria needed to establish the time crystal’s existence. Khemani, Moessner, Shivaji Sondhi of Princeton and Achilleas Lazarides of Loughborough University in the United Kingdom discovered the possibility of the phase and described its key properties in 2015 a rival group of physicists led by Chetan Nayak of Microsoft Station Q and the University of California, Santa Barbara identified it as a time crystal soon after. “This is just this completely new and exciting space that we’re working in now,” said Vedika Khemani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford who co-discovered the novel phase while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper with the Google team. The time crystal is the first “out-of-equilibrium” phase: It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium: Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don’t change with time. The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.

Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time.

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