Physicists have successfully taught a quantum computer in Australia to simulate a time crystal of a record size. The research could pave the way for new ways of storing information.

a crystal that keeps returning to its ground state in a cycle

according to him science magazine Researchers have succeeded in creating a time crystal consisting of 57 quantum particles. This is a significant increase over the 20-particle time crystal created by scientists at Google last year. According to the researchers, the new time crystal is so large that no conventional computer will be able to emulate it.

A time crystal is a fundamentally hypothetical object whose phase space has a periodic structure that would not otherwise exist. This means that the crystal repeats itself over and over again. Accordingly, one can imagine the crystal as a system that is trapped in a perpetual cycle.

Researchers turn impossible speculation into reality

The term was first used ten years ago when Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was thinking about the spatial structure of atoms in a simple crystal. He asked himself something fundamental: How does this pattern come about?

The pattern in atoms doesn’t really happen according to equations about forces between atoms. A lot depends on how cool they are. When some atoms come close to each other, it becomes easier to predict the position of the next atom. This happens even if it is not explicitly stated in the equations.

Now the question was whether such ideas can be transferred in future also. In this way he envisioned a quantum particle system that interacts through forces that do not change with time. This system should nonetheless be able to manifest cyclic evolution, even in its lowest energy state. However, the thought experiment turned out to be an unattainable goal.

However, in 2016, two new pieces of research revived the concept when they considered a mechanism that is repeatedly excited by an external force. They found that if certain conditions are met, it can adopt a pattern of change over time that repeats like an echo at a lower frequency than the stimulus. Crystals were detected for the first time.

Qubits act like magnets

The device consists of a series of tiny quantum mechanical magnets that, thanks to strange principles of quantum mechanics, can point not only up or down, but in both directions at once. Adjacent magnets in a chain align in opposite directions, reducing their energy, while a random local magnetic field causes each magnet to point to one side or the other.

A constant effect of magnetic impulses ensures that the magnet moves around every two impulses. The purpose of the device is that each configuration of magnets repeatedly rotates around its axis.

This concept has been demonstrated in a variety of systems, from electrons moving around a diamond to ions trapped in a trap. This has also been done in quantum computers with quantum bits or qubits.

Physicists Philip Frey and Stephen Rachael from the University of Melbourne have now produced a much larger qubit proof. He experimented on a network of quantum computers operated by IBM in the United States. This is possible because qubits can behave similarly to magnets. They have values ​​of 0.1 or both at the same time.

The researchers found that for some configurations of their interactions, any initial setting of 57 qubits, such as 01101101110… remains constant over two pulses, returning to the initial state after every two pulses.

picture of Rostislav Uzunov Feather Pixabay