Time

Time crystals sound like something a video game character would be trying to collect, but this bizarre phase of matter is very real – and now one of them has been created in Google’s quantum processor, Sycamore.

We’re all familiar with the march of time, but why it does so is a mystery. In 2016 Australian physicist Joan Vaccaro proposed a new quantum theory of time, and now a team will test the hypothesis by searching for time dilation in a nuclear reactor.

Atomic clocks are our most precise timekeepers, with the best ones keeping time to within one second in 15 billion years. But there’s always room for improvement, as researchers at MIT have now demonstrated with a new quantum-entangled atomic clock.

Physicists in Germany have measured the shortest timespan ever recorded. The team measured the time it takes for a photon of light to travel the length of a hydrogen molecule, and found it to occur in just trillionths of a billionth of a second.

Time crystals are strange phases of matter that appear to break time-translation symmetry. Now scientists have observed two time crystals interacting for the first time, which could be a step towards practical applications like quantum computing.

Which time travel movie got the rules right? According to experiments using a quantum time travel simulator, reality is “self-healing,” so changes made to the past won’t drastically alter the future you came from – at least, in the quantum realm.

NASA has confirmed that a miniaturized, ultra-precise mercury-ion atomic clock currently in low-Earth orbit has been switched on.

The subjective sense that time moves faster as we get older is a universal one, and over the years​ scientists have proffered a number of different explanations as to why this happens. A new and strange hypothesis attempts to explain the phenomena, and it has to do with our aging brains.

In recent tests run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), experimental atomic clocks have achieved record performance in three metrics, meaning these clocks could help measure the Earth’s gravity more precisely or detect elusive dark matter.

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who passed away in March, is set to be interred in Westminster Abbey in June. In a final show of the man’s wit and dedication to the weirder realms of physics, it seems that time travelers are on the guest list.

At the heart of an atomic clock are, as the name suggests, atoms of a specific type. Now, physicists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found that lutetium atoms could make for more stable atomic clocks.

A time crystal sounds like a sci-fi concept, but they’re very real, and as new research reveals, you might have some in your home already. Scientists at Yale University have now spotted the signature of a time crystal in a common crystal that crops up in off-the-shelf crystal-growing kits for kids.