Chaos to coordination: Vibrating material organizes itself into a single rhythm Scientists have developed a material that can grow and coordinate its own movement until the entire structure pulses in unison, paving the way for versatile robots that behave more like living systems. Publishing their findings today (14 Oct) in Nature, engineers from the University of Birmingham working with the Universities of Amsterdam, Lyon, Delft, Leiden and Cambridge reveal that they have created a mechatronic metamaterial that behaves as a ‘time crystal.' Time crystals are an unusual form of matter in which particles endlessly move in regular, repeating cycles. But here, the “particles” were not the atoms of molecules: they were robots. The scientists’ experimental material combines elastic structures, sensors, electronics, and actuators so that neighbouring components can influence one another. The key ingredient to generate the time-crystalline state was making the interactions between components ‘non-reciprocal,' meaning that one component's response to another does not have to be mirrored in reverse. When reciprocity was broken in the material, individual vibrations initially appeared at short wavelengths, but then progressively grew in wavelength, period, and amplitude - resulting in a globally synchronised state that the researchers demonstrate is a time crystal. The team describe the process they have discovered as ‘wave coarsening.' nanotechnologyworld.org/post…