By: William Brown, Biophysicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

We first reported on the break-through observation of a time crystal in our article Time Crystals – A New Phase of Matter. Now, in the next major development, the same team who generated the new phase of matter have created the first time-crystal two-body system in an experiment that seems to bend the laws of physics.

As the name would imply, a time crystal is not an easy system to prepare and experiment with. Perpetual ground state motion in equilibrium defines a time crystal, however observing such motion is famously unfeasible, because experimentally a time crystal only achieves stability if it is isolated from the environment and the observer in a quantum state, where either the perpetuity or equilibrium requirements can be “bent”. Much like the quantum mechanical bit, or qubit, coupling separate time crystals while retaining sufficient isolation is a major challenge for researchers...