Scientists find new form of matter. Time crystals.

finally!

It sounds exciting but we have to wait for peer review of the Maryland and Harvard methods of constructing the time crystals. Because they used different approaches and got the same results does sound promising but duplication of their efforts could take time.

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But it's one thing to predict these time crystals exist, it's another entirely to make them, which is where the new study comes in.

Yao and his team have now come up with a detailed blueprint that describes exactly how to make and measure the properties of a time crystal, and even predict what the various phases surrounding the time crystals should be - which means they've mapped out the equivalent of the solid, liquid, and gas phases for the new form of matter.

Published in Physical Review Letters, Yao calls the paper "the bridge between the theoretical idea and the experimental implementation".

And it's not just speculation, either. Based on Yao's blueprint, two independent teams - one from the University of Maryland and one from Harvard - have now followed the instructions to create their own time crystals.

Both of these developments were announced at the end of last year on the pre-print site arXiv.org (here and here), and have been submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Yao is a co-author on both articles.

While we're waiting for the papers to be published, we need to be skeptical about the two claims. But the fact that two separate teams have used the same blueprint to make time crystals out of vastly different systems is promising.

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