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Stanford and Google Team Up To Create Time Crystals With Quantum Computers - SciTechDaily

Stanford and Google Team Up To Create Time Crystals With Quantum Computers - SciTechDaily

Stanford and Google Team Up To Create Time Crystals With Quantum Computers - SciTechDaily
Dec 01, 2021 4 mins, 13 secs

A team of researchers including ones from Stanford and Google have created and observed a new phase of matter, popularly known as a time crystal.

There is a huge global effort to engineer a computer capable of harnessing the power of quantum physics to carry out computations of unprecedented complexity.

For example, the creation of a new phase of matter called a “time crystal.” Just as a crystal’s structure repeats in space, a time crystal repeats in time and, importantly, does so infinitely and without any further input of energy – like a clock that runs forever without any batteries.

The quest to realize this phase of matter has been a longstanding challenge in theory and experiment – one that has now finally come to fruition.

In research published on November 30, 2021, in the journal Nature, a team of scientists from Stanford University, Google Quantum AI, the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and Oxford University detail their creation of a time crystal using Google’s Sycamore quantum computing hardware.

The Google Sycamore chip used in the creation of a time crystal.

“The big picture is that we are taking the devices that are meant to be the quantum computers of the future and thinking of them as complex quantum systems in their own right,” said Matteo Ippoliti, a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and co-lead author of the work.

For the team, the excitement of their achievement lies not only in creating a new phase of matter but in opening up opportunities to explore new regimes in their field of condensed matter physics, which studies the novel phenomena and properties brought about by the collective interactions of many objects in a system.

“Time-crystals are a striking example of a new type of non-equilibrium quantum phase of matter,” said Vedika Khemani, assistant professor of physics at Stanford and a senior author of the paper.

“While much of our understanding of condensed matter physics is based on equilibrium systems, these new quantum devices are providing us a fascinating window into new non-equilibrium regimes in many-body physics.”.

The basic ingredients to make this time crystal are as follows: The physics equivalent of a fruit fly and something to give it a kick.

The fruit fly of physics is the Ising model, a longstanding tool for understanding various physical phenomena – including phase transitions and magnetism – which consists of a lattice where each site is occupied by a particle that can be in two states, represented as a spin up or down.

During her graduate school years, Khemani, her doctoral advisor Shivaji Sondhi, then at Princeton University, and Achilleas Lazarides and Roderich Moessner at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems stumbled upon this recipe for making time crystals unintentionally.

Symmetries play a fundamental role in physics, and they are often broken – explaining the origins of regular crystals, magnets and many other phenomena; however, time translation symmetry stands out because unlike other symmetries, it can’t be broken in equilibrium.

“It’s a completely robust phase of matter, where you’re not fine-tuning parameters or states but your system is still quantum,” said Sondhi, professor of physics at Oxford and co-author of the paper.

While this may sound suspiciously close to a “perpetual motion machine,” a closer look reveals that time crystals don’t break any laws of physics.

Between the development of this plan for a time crystal and the quantum computer experiment that brought it to reality, many experiments by many different teams of researchers achieved various almost-time-crystal milestones.

For Khemani and her collaborators, the final step to time crystal success was working with a team at Google Quantum AI.

Revealing just how intense the interest in time crystals currently is, another time crystal was published in Science this month.

The researchers were able to confirm their claim of a true time crystal thanks to special capabilities of the quantum computer.

Although the finite size and coherence time of the (imperfect) quantum device meant that their experiment was limited in size and duration – so that the time crystal oscillations could only be observed for a few hundred cycles rather than indefinitely – the researchers devised various protocols for assessing the stability of their creation.

“We managed to use the versatility of the quantum computer to help us analyze its own limitations,” said Moessner, co-author of the paper and director at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems.

“A unique feature of our quantum processor is its ability to create highly complex quantum states,” said Xiao Mi, a researcher at Google and co-lead author of the paper.

“These states allow the phase structures of matter to be effectively verified without needing to investigate the entire computational space – an otherwise intractable task.”.

This work was led by Stanford University, Google Quantum AI, the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems and Oxford University.

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