BREAKING: New Phase of Matter

we're filming a video about um time crystals okay this was like a big discovery in 2021 2012 we came up with a theory for this new phase of matter fast forward to 2021 physicists used one of google's quantum computers to make a time crystal what is that sentence i was looking back through some of the big discoveries in physics that happened last year i don't know how i missed this one it's crazy have you ever heard of time crystals it sounds like something in the marvel cinematic universe it does time crystals are talked about in the doctor who series so you're really not far off oh do you know what a crystal is i don't know what defines a crystal give me a crystal rubies ruby okay so i'm looking up the atomic structure of rubies yeah it's repeating it looks like tiles the pattern is repeating but in three dimensions this is what diamond looks like you're looking down at atoms carbon carbon carbon feeding this way this is what the pattern of table salt looks like chlorine sodium chlorine sodium but the physics definition of something crystalline it has to do with whether the structure is repeating whether it has a pattern so you're repeating this way you're repeating that way and repeating this way so it's repeating in all dimensions how many dimensions are there three yeah three spatial dimensions but there's a fourth dimension a time time but imagine you're also repeating in your time dimension i don't know what that means i know right no one else did either until 2012 this was like a random thought experiment of this guy named frank wilchick frank wilcheck is a professor at mit i met him a couple times while i was there a year after i graduated so that's how recent this theory was like not the discovery but the theory was in 2012 it was the year after i graduated and he was preparing for a class on symmetries in physics and he was like so what if there were symmetries not in just spatial dimensions but in time as well and what he thought that might look like is that you could conceive of a material that has some kind of state and it repeats back and forth so just like with the crystalline structure you know has chlorine and sodium and chlorine so you're repeating back and forth but instead you have a material that's in one state and then a different state and then back to the first state so you can imagine an object like that right like a metronome think of state as like the left orientation in your metronome or the right orientation can you think of anything else like a seesaw yeah like a seesaw water evaporating waterfall yeah like the water cycle the thing about most of those something powers that with the metronome typically there's like a spring so there's some energy going in and it's using that energy so what what frank wilcheck was really imagining like a microscopic scale material that has two different states left to right to left to right i don't know up to down to up to down or something is there any material example that sends two states like that it's not something as big as water as complex as a clock something really small on the atomic scale yeah there are some things i mean what they ended up using were atoms that have have spin i didn't want to get into this yet but i now i want to do you know what spin even is like i started talking about this no yeah me neither it's one of those inherent properties that's so fundamental to a particle and we can see what it does it's like even with mass it's hard to explain what mass really fundamentally is we can explain what it does it pulls other masses toward it it affects the curvature of space-time what is mass and the same is true of spin where a lot of particles have properties called spin spin is a really special property because it can change and it can flip from up to down you can actually point in a lot of different directions but typically when you measure it you measure on the up and down axis and it will just choose one or the other when you do that that's a quantum thing we're not going to get into it but for simplicity let's imagine that our particle can only be spin up and spin down spin it looks like this magnetic moment it looks like this little magnetic field coming from a electric charge going around in a circle you'd think like maybe it actually is the charged particle's spinning but neutrons what's the charge of a neutron it's yeah it's zero don't have any charge and they have spin so it's it's not necessarily it's not as simple as a charge spinning or a charge going around a circle it's this intrinsic property that's really hard to describe makes sense okay cool so spin that on is something on a atomic scale that can flip back and forth so that answers your question in a very roundabout way but i'm glad that we did that because i'm glad too because i would hate to go further without without knowing what spin is yeah okay so it's 2012 frank wilcheck's idea was imagine that there's this material where you have a state like spin up or spin down and it flips back and forth before you see my brain explode trying to finally explain what time crystals are a quick message thanks to helix for sponsoring this video you know what determines the quality of my videos more than anything whether i got a good night's sleep having a regular sleep schedule is so important to me that i will stop a movie halfway through which doesn't make me a monster kyle the science on sleep is clear we need quality sleep to function better and having a good mattress can make a big difference in the quality of your sleep helix sleep makes premium mattresses and bedding that's conveniently shipped right to your door they help you find the right mattress for you using a sleep quiz that accounts for your body type and sleeping preferences and they have something for everyone and if you sleep with a partner you can even take the quiz together to find something that's the perfect compromise based on my results helix matched me with the 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crystals would be something a material that repeats states back and forth in time that's why he called it a time crystal imagine you don't give it any energy like a metronome is using the energy you put into it two years later so in 2014 a paper came out where physicists argued that this is actually impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics have you ever heard of that over time like the entropy of the universe tends to increase things don't order themselves the universe tends to go toward chaos overall entropy increases the gist of that law is that you can't have perpetual motion machines you can't have a wheel that just spins forever and ever you can't have i thought you could you and all of those tick talkers that are trying to make perpetual motion machines did you not watch my video on perpetual emotion essentially what franklincheck thought of was a perpetual motion machine so even on a microscopic scale it's not possible to have something like this but then fast forward to 2020 21 2000 to 2021 physicists used one of google's quantum computers to make a time crystal what does that sentence mean have you heard of a quantum computer no really oh whoa okay guessing it either works with quantum stuff or it's really really tidy definitely the former i've never actually had to explain a quantum computer so i wasn't ready for this but the gist of a quantum computer is that with a regular computer the basic unit like the basic thing storing your information are bits ones and zeros and they store it as like electrical setting even this one even your phone like all the processing is done with bits that's why you have to have terabytes because you have to have trillions and trillions of bits so that's a typical computer with a quantum computer the biggest difference is that the bits are called qubits each bit is actually a little quantum system so that could just be an electron or something that is so small it has quantum properties which means you have to deal with superposition of states and interacting wave functions and tunneling like quantum tunneling through barriers you have to deal with that in a quantum computer but the idea is that if you've got interaction between all your different qubits with each other you can have many many different kinds of states with fewer bits that's that's enough they're not user friendly like there's no personal quantum computers yet but in 2021 we used a quant we google and a bunch of researchers used a quantum computer to make a time crystal and the quantum computer or the bits in it became the time crystal we're talking about like something happening on a really small microscopic scale and where can you get one of those that you can easily control inside of a quantum computer that's what the computer's made to do so you could have these electrons that are pointing spin up and spin down and you can control whether they're spin up and spin down or whether they're interacting with each other the qubits in google's sycamore quantum computer are more complicated than just simple individual electron spins but i simplified and called them spins so forgive me all of this feels a little bit hard to grasp like why this is important all that they really did is they used 20 quantum bits inside of this computer and they set them randomly to states of up and downs they took all these qubits and put them in a line so that they were close enough they were closely interacting with each other which was important and then they made them either spin up or spin down spin up down down up up up down up so a random configuration and then they got them to flip i am not going to be able to do this oh my gosh this is so hard yeah but all at once they got them to flip to down up up down down down up down and then back to the original state and back and forth now the real test and then it'll flip back to its original state almost like it remembered something from the original state which is what's so crazy about these things it's like there's this inherent memory in the system of where it was and where it's going [Music] but i said that 2014 we said that physicists wrote a paper saying this was impossible but what's missing was that they actually sent in laser light and they like just kind of kept this laser going at it it flipped back and forth so it wasn't perpetual motion so it wasn't perpetual motion because you had an input of energy the difference between this time crystal and something like a metronome is that the time crystal didn't absorb any of the energy so like the laser light is obviously interacting with the time crystal in some way but it's not using any of the energy crazy that's the cool part yeah does it flip right after the laser leaves soon after you would think that the time crystal this this system would flip states with the frequency with every oscillation of the light but that's not what happens it flips every integer multiple of the frequencies i actually got this part a little bit wrong so i said the qubits are flipping with integer multiples of the frequency of the light but it's in fact integer multiples of the length of the pulses of the light and has nothing to do with the frequency of the light so thank you to jared and robert who reviewed this video and caught that error for me you know every two or every four which would be weird because it'd be like you push a kid on a swing right and they go forward and back with every push that you do imagine like you push the kid and then it stays over there for three more pushes and you have to like go push the kid and it doesn't come back and then it's and then on the fourth time it swings and then it goes up there and stays again seeing the kid on the swing and it only comes back every four times those are the weird things about this time crystal it doesn't use up any energy and it doesn't heat up the system the system stays exactly the same temperature which is very weird and then the other a weird thing is that it doesn't oscillate with the light it oscillates with an integer multiple of the light it did break a symmetry of the universe have you ever heard of that i assume not it's a complicated way of saying that the laws of physics will act the same today as they do tomorrow if you put a ball on a hill today it will roll down and if you put the ball in the hill tomorrow it won't roll up it will still roll down translate your system through time it should do exactly the same thing but if you look at the time crystal in one moment it's flipping like this and the next moment it's not doing that it's flipping back [Music] often in physics you come up with a theory and then it's like 50 to 100 years before you get the thing but in this case the idea was conceived in 2012. the theory is only a 10 year old and yet we have the the discovery already that's amazing that never happens in physics and in fact in 2015 there were a couple that we thought were time crystals like we were close and physicists were like we found time crystals and then we're like oh they didn't quite satisfy the criteria they have to be a little more stable and then fast forward nine years you have a quantum computer doing that that's crazy and now there have been other time crystals there's a time crystal made in light now i'm gonna like i've given you an idea of what a time crystal is now i'm just gonna blow that wide open be like you don't even need matter this sounds like endless opportunities and really cool stuff that's awesome is that what it sounds like to physicists as well as it sounds maybe richard feynman are you familiar with his name yes he wrote an entire paper that was about imagining a day when quantum computers are used to simulate physics you have to use quantum systems to simulate the physics and learn something about it but you are actually doing the physics and he imagined a day when quantum computers would be used to do something like that and here we are so you wouldn't hit the limits of an application you would hit the limits of physics exactly that's what that's time crystals well i you could have sat me down and just told me about the 2012 theory and we could have hung out and talked about that would have been fun true your normal classical computer i get back yeah it's happy physics in levi thank you that's the first time you directed it to me oh i said happy physics like you said thank you i love it [Music] you

Channel: Physics Girl

Views: 1,432,642

Keywords: physics girl, dianna cowern

Id: ieDIpgso4no

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Gerry1of1]

Sounds like dilithium crystals so ..... Star Trek did it first.