Normal crystals have patterns that appear in three dimensions, but time crystals have patterns that repeat in time Tetra Images/Getty Images
A new kind of time crystal has been created and it could explain how these mysterious substances function and reveal the scale at which quantum effects kick in.
The existence of time crystals was first proposed in 2012 by Frank Wilczek at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Normal crystals have patterns that repeat in three-dimensional space, creating a lattice structure, but Wilczek imagined a crystal-like quantum system whose constituent parts would regularly and perpetually move to create patterns…
