{"id":423621,"date":"2026-02-13T13:04:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T13:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/423621\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T13:04:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T13:04:07","slug":"scientists-discover-time-crystals-you-can-hold-and-they-levitate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/423621\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists Discover Time Crystals You Can Hold\u2014and They Levitate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, physicists created a time crystal\u2014atomic arrangements repeating motion patterns\u2014visible<\/a> to the naked eye. But the latest research on this quantum eccentricity might represent more than a few steps forward.<\/p>\n

This time crystal, described in a recent Physical Review Letters<\/a> paper, is big enough to be held in your hand, and it levitates. Discovered by a team of physicists at New York University (NYU), the new type of time crystal consists of styrofoam-like beads that levitate on a cushion of sound while exchanging sound waves.<\/p>\n

If that wasn\u2019t strange enough, the time crystal does this by violating Newtonian physics\u2014and the team believes that gives the new crystal both academic and practical significance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a discovery in the truest sense,\u201d David G. Grier<\/a>, the study\u2019s senior author and a physicist at NYU, told Gizmodo. \u201cPerhaps the most remarkable thing is that such rich and interesting behavior emerges from such a simple system.\u201d<\/p>\n

What are time crystals? <\/p>\n

In 2012, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek pitched<\/a> an idea for an impossible crystal breaking the rules of symmetry in physics. Typically, solid crystals maintain a continuous lattice of their respective components. Time crystals, however, do the exact opposite, with the individual atoms inside them changing positions over time in a relatively defined pattern.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In the past decade or so, physicists have managed to find varying versions of Wilczek\u2019s vision. But these instances mostly featured short-term, microscopic time crystals with little practical implications. It was only last year that one team at the University of Colorado Boulder proposed<\/a> a time crystal design that we can actually see.<\/p>\n

Styrofoam finds a new quirk \"NyuThe setup of the new time crystal system. A bead (purple) is suspended in mid-air by sound waves emanating from (black) circular speakers arranged in a six-inch-tall 3D-printed frame. Credit: NYU Center for Soft Matter Research <\/p>\n

The newly discovered time crystal may represent huge advances in the practical relevance of time crystals. For one, the bead in the experiment is expanded polystyrene\u2014the same material used for packing styrofoam.<\/p>\n

The team turned this common material into a time crystal by suspending styrofoam beads in sound waves. By itself, the bead floats motionlessly, but things begin to change once multiple beads levitate together.<\/p>\n

In this system, each bead scatters its own share of sound waves. That contributes\u00a0to an overall system of \u201cunbalanced interactions\u201d that essentially allows the particles to harvest and supply energy from the sound waves, Grier explained. \u201cThe key point is that time crystals select their own frequency without being told what to do by any external force.\u201d<\/p>\n

The simplest of them all? <\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, these interactions aren\u2019t bound to Newton\u2019s third law of motion, which dictates that two bodies exerting force on each other must exert the same amount of force in opposite directions.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink of two ferries of different sizes approaching a dock,\u201d Mia Morrell, the study\u2019s lead author and a graduate student at NYU, said in a university statement<\/a>. \u201cEach one makes water waves that push the other one around\u2014but to different degrees, depending on their size.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"TimeA stop-motion image that shows pairs of millimeter-scale beads forming a time crystal over approximately one-third of a second in time. The colors represent the beads interacting at different stages during this period. Credit: NYU Center for Soft Matter Research <\/p>\n

According to Grier, the sheer simplicity of this time crystal setup potentially makes it the \u201chydrogen atom\u201d for this phenomenon\u2014highlighting its potential across other contexts, such as \u201cthe neural pacemakers in our hearts to cyclic trends in financial markets.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re hoping that studying a minimal model will provide access to the deepest insights into the spontaneous emergence of clocks in more general and more complex manifestations,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last year, physicists created a time crystal\u2014atomic arrangements repeating motion patterns\u2014visible to the naked eye. But the latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[32147,2302,4418,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-423621","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-material-science","9":"tag-physics","10":"tag-quantum-physics","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}