A world-first photonic time crystal can reshape light almost instantly, opening a path toward ultrafast optical technology.

An international research team has created the first experimentally demonstrated all-optical photonic time crystal (PTC), a material whose optical behavior can be altered strongly and repeatedly over extremely short periods of time.

The work, carried out by scientists from École Polytechnique, Collège de France, and Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), was published in Nature. The researchers used HZDR’s TELBE superradiant terahertz source to push the material into a previously unexplored form of light-matter interaction in the terahertz range.