Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast. Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in

science and mathematics. I'm Susan Vallett. A time crystal sounds like something out of a

sci-fi movie. It forever cycles between states without consuming energy. And now, physicists claim to have

built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer. That's next.

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In a pre-print posted online in July, researchers at Google collaborated with physicists at Stanford, Princeton, and other universities.

They say that they've used Google's quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine time crystal.

In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier in the same month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.

A time crystal is a novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years.

It's an object whose parts move in a regular repeating cycle,

sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.

Roderick Musner of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany,

says the consequence is amazing.

He says you evade the second law of thermodynamics.

That's the law that says disorder always increases. Musner co-authored the Google

paper. Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break time translation symmetry,

the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing,

with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time. The time crystal is a new category

of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice,

...