"The feat, accomplished by physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder, and published in Nature Materials on 4 September, involved liquid crystals - bar-shaped molecules with properties between those of a liquid and those of a solid. Simply by shining a light on the liquid crystals, the team created ripples of twisting molecules through them. The ripples kept moving for hours, undulating with a distinct beat, even when the researchers changed the conditions."
"Nobel prizewinning physicist Frank Wilczek first proposed the idea of a time crystal in 2012. Wilczek's version was almost like a perpetual-motion machine; something that cycled endlessly while in its natural resting state. A team later published a paper that mathematically proved this concept was impossible, but researchers soon found that other kinds of time crystal were possible. Ordered time crystals could exist, for example, in bizarre systems that were perpetually in flux, rather than at rest."
Physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder created a visible time crystal by using liquid crystals—bar-shaped molecules with properties between a liquid and a solid. Shining light on the material produced ripples of twisting molecules that persisted for hours and oscillated with a distinct beat that remained out of sync with any driving force, meeting both defining criteria for a time crystal. The phenomena occurs on millimetre-to-centimetre scales, enabling direct observation and potential applications such as anti-counterfeit devices. The concept builds on time-crystal ideas proposed in 2012 that evolved from impossible perpetual-motion variants to realizable non-equilibrium ordered phases.
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