Circadian rhythm. The 24 (OK, closer to 24.8) hour cycle that governs our lives. It always intrigued me. Mostly because I don’t sleep the “required” number of hours- and wondered if my cycle was off.

I even had a professor try to make this area of study my life’s work. OK. He was really more interested in an intriguing, inorganic phenomenon called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction.

https://youtu.be/3JAqrRnKFHo

Hmm. One step back. Y’all know that chemical reactions either “go all the way” or “reach an equilibrium”.

By going all the way, I mean when you add chemical A to chemical B, you get either chemical C or Chemicals C,D,E, and whatever.  And, if the new products (C, D, E) are gases that blow out of the mixture or solids that settle to the bottom (and are removed from the system), the reaction absolutely continues until one of the reactants (the starting chemicals A and B) are used up. (You will have some leftover A or B, to insure the reactions goes to completion; i.e., goes all the way.)

By reaching equilibrium, we have chemicals A and B reacting (lets say to form C and D), but that the end products are some mixture of A, B, C, and D. But, the relative amounts change according to temperature, pH, pressure, or some other condition. If the conditions don’t change, then you have an equilibrium value of all the compounds (no “all the way” reaction.)

So, now that you are thoroughly confused (I hope not), the BZ reaction is one that oscillates. One minute the mixture is blue, the next minute- the mixture is red. And, this continues. The steady state condition is always changing. Which is why my professor was trying to convince me it would be a great model for circadian rhythm. (It is a model, but not one that intrigued me.)

Nor did the biological version of the BZ reaction that involved yeasts thrill me all that much. But, this professor controlled my funding for a year and it became one of my required projects.

This was a long way of introducing a new development. Drs. J Zhang, PW Hess, A Kyprianidis, P Becker, A Lee, J Smith, G Pagano, and C Monroe (University of Maryland, Chris Monroe is the senior author) and Drs. D Potirniche, AC Potter, A Vishwanath and N Y Yao (UC Berkeley) collaborated to develop a “time crystal“. These researchers were attempting to see if Dr. Frank Wilczek (MIT, who also is a Nobel Prize winner) and Al Shapere (Kentucky) were correct in this hypothesis- even though most physicists deemed this concept impossible (against the “laws” of physics).

What the heck is a time crystal anyway? Well, you know that crystals are pretty organized materials that have repeating patterns in space. (Think of a snow flake or a diamond.) When matter crystallizes (becomes solid), the atoms seemingly spontaneously arrange themselves in organized structures (crystal lattices). An atom or ion is situated at each lattice point, employing a discrete- not continuous- set of choices for their location. They form repeating patterns in some- but not all- directions.

But, this new development involves the materials repeating their orientation as a function of time- and not space. Using Ytterbium ions in a ring-shaped arrangement, the ions spin and point up or down. And, this new configuration repeats itself over time.

If the ions are flipped half-way (by an outside force, in this case when the researchers apply laser light energy), the ions return to their original states (full circle) over a time interval that was twice that of the time it took the scientists to flip the ions half way.

And, if the ions were not really flipped perfectly halfway, they still returned to their original configuration- all in the proper time frame. (The defined time interval.)
Theoretically, these crystals could oscillate forever. But, while the molecules may continually rotate, we can’t extract energy from this motion (because we can’t develop perpetual motion machines- this part of physics still holds firmly).

(The BZ reaction oscillates for a long time- but not forever. Because in real life, the source of chemicals runs out.)