Magnetic helium makes superfluid time crystal

Enlarge / No, no. Time crystals aren't anything like The Dark Crystal. (credit: Jim Henson Studios)

Sometimes, a paper contains so many buzzwords it is hard to take it seriously. Time crystals were first mooted in 2012, and a realistic discrete time crystal was observed in 2017. The crystals we are familiar with have a quasicrystal form, so time quasicrystals were soon discovered. But now, I've hit the jackpot with a time quasicrystal that is also a time supersolid. If that makes no sense to you, don't worry, it doesn't make sense to me either.

Let's unpack the word salad and see if we can extract something sensible from it.

Crystals and quasicrystals: neither heals disease

A crystal in space is a unit that repeats at regular intervals so that it fills a space without gaps. The repeating unit can only be translated, not rotated. Thus, you can get arrangements of atoms that make up a cube, for example, to fill a space.

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