Time crystals provide hope for the quantum computers of the future

- This is an extremely difficult experiment that they have succeeded in, says Thomas Kvorning who is a theoretical physicist at the University of California in Berkeley, USA.

In a laboratory at Aalto University in Helsinki, a very cold freezer, a cryostat, is spinning. The temperature is ten thousandths of a degree above absolute zero (which is -273.15 degrees Celsius).

Inside the cryostat, Finnish and British researchers have succeeded in creating two time crystals of liquid helium. They interact with each other and exchange information. The study is published in Nature Materials.

In an ordinary crystal, the atoms are arranged in a fixed pattern that repeats itself, which is why a diamond gets its special luster. But in a time crystal, the atoms are instead arranged in time. They are formed in a pattern that disappears and reappears at certain times. This makes them stable - an unusual feature in the quantum world.

When you observe matter on a very small scale, at the atomic level, you look into the quantum world, which is subject to completely different laws of nature than our normal world. The atoms are usually unstable, a small disturbance and they change state.

This property makes it a great challenge to get the atoms to do what the scientists want, for example to be the smallest component in a quantum computer. They do not succeed in being stable long enough to be able to perform their computational tasks.

So the question now is whether one could build a quantum computer of stable time crystals?

- Time crystals are stable for a few seconds, and it is almost like an eternity in the quantum world, but it is enough for a quantum computer to make a calculation, says Thomas Kvorning.

This is still basic research in a new field in quantum physics. To be able to use these time crystals in quantum computers, one must succeed in creating very many who communicate with each other without at the same time destroying these sensitive systems.

But now, for the first time, physicists have managed to get two such time crystals to communicate.

- They have shown that they can gain control over the time crystals so it is a step towards quantum computers, but it is still a long way off, says Thomas Kvorning.

Play the video above and see how to create stable time crystals.