A group of scientists have managed to achieve a major breakthrough, having created the world's very first ever 'time crystals' which could have a number of fascinating applications, including inside $100 dollar bills.
Countless scientific discoveries are made every single year, and while some have no practical benefit to the everyday lives of billions of people across the Earth, many can change the world even in the smallest of ways.
Some have miraculously been able to achieve the act of teleportation through the use of a supercomputer for the very first time, and experts at NASA might just have discovered the secret to living a longer life that many are obviously fascinated in testing out.
While it might perhaps not be quite as impactful as those two discoveries, the creation of the world's first 'time crystal' could have significant ramifications of the future, especially when it comes to how money is printed and data is stored.
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What are time crystals?
As reported by Live Science, physicists at the University of Colorado Boulder have published a new study in the Nature Materials journal that details the discovery and creation of what are known as 'time crystals'.
These are, in the words of the study, "unexpected states of matter that spontaneously break time-translation symmetry either in a discrete or continuous manner," although they're more simply understood as states of matter which are locked into a perpetual and repeating motion.
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Standard crystals repeat their structure in space, whereas time crystals not only repeat in time but stay continuously moving in its lowest resting state, as opposed to the former which eventually reaches a point of stasis.
Time crystals previously have never been able to be created without some artificial input of energy, yet this new discovery manages to create that by 'sandwiching' liquid crystals between dye-coated pieces of glass, which allows the molecules to form kinks which then move around.
"You have these twists, and you can't easily remove them," explained the study's co-autyhor Ivan Smalyukh. "They behave like particles and start interacting with each other."
How will they be used in dollar bills?
While the discovery remains in the early stages of development, the scientists behind it have evaluated that it could eventually be used in high denomination dollar bills and even for data storage after continued research and development.
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It is, in theory, a highly effective tools that can be used to combat counterfeiting, as these time crystals act almost as watermarks which distinguish the authenticity of higher value bills like $100, for example.
"We don't want to put a limit on the applications right now," Smalyukh evaluated, adding that he thinks "there are opportunities to push this technology in all sorts of directions."
There could even be the possibility for more complicated patters to store large amounts of data within the repeated fragments of time, and that would certainly prove to be one of the more fascinating modes of encryption available and very much a step into a science fiction future.