Scientists have created an extreme version of the “impossible” by inflating a bunch of atoms like a balloon. State of matter.
Physicists bombarded rubidium atoms with a laser, making them puff up Rydberg County As a result of the experiment, exotic State of matter Known as Time Crystal.
According to the researchers, this opens up new ways to study the properties of time crystals, as well as phenomena such as quantum fluctuations, correlations and synchronization. Quantum Computer Design.
First described American theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek year 2012Time crystals are the motion of particles that repeat in the time dimension, just as crystals such as diamonds and quartz are patterns of particles that repeat in space.
While the original theory described the patterns as repeating “perpetually,” a “transient” version has also emerged. Experimentally Realized and Observed in Another way by A diverse team of physicistsIn these, it is possible to measure vibration patterns that differ from the external rhythm imposed on the crystal.
This new kind of Time Crystal It was produced from a room-temperature gas of rubidium atoms trapped in a glass container.
A team of physicists led by Xiaoling Wu, Zhuqing Wang and Fan Yang from Tsinghua University in China used laser light to excite atoms into the Rydberg state, a state in which energy is added to the atom and its outermost electron orbits farther around the nucleus, meaning the atom’s radius swells to hundreds of times its normal size.
This is still pretty small from our perspective, but it has interesting effects on the way the atoms interact when they’re all gathered together in a glass box.
“When the atoms in a glass container are prepared in this Rydberg state, and the diameter of the container becomes enormous, the forces between these atoms also become very large.” Physicist Thomas Pohl explains of the Vienna University of Technology.
“And that in turn changes the way the atoms interact with the laser. If we choose the laser light such that it can excite two different Rydberg states in each atom simultaneously, we create a feedback loop that causes spontaneous oscillations between the two atomic states. This in turn also leads to oscillating light absorption.”
So when the team excited the rubidium gas with laser light, something interesting happened: The laser intensity remained constant, but when they measured the light at the far end of the chamber, they saw the atoms oscillating back and forth between excited and less excited states, a sign of atomic vibration.
These vibrations occurred organically and therefore met the definition of a time crystal.
“This is really a static experiment where no particular rhythm is imposed on the system.” Paul says“The interaction of light with atoms is always the same – the intensity of the laser beam is constant. But surprisingly, we found that the intensity that reaches the other side of the glass cell starts to oscillate in a very regular pattern.”
This could have applications in technologies that require highly regular and self-sustained oscillations: metrology, the science of measurement, could use such systems, for example; and quantum information processing. Based on Rydberg atoms It will be a powerful tool for computing applications.
“Here we have created a new system that provides a powerful platform for improving our understanding of the time crystal phenomenon, very close to Frank Wilczek’s original idea.” Paul says.
This study Natural Physics.
