Tabletop spacetime crystal melts in three stages, showing time and space order can detach
Physicists built a tabletop spacetime crystal from hundreds of plastic disks on a vibrating plate and observed a three-stage melt: temporal order decays locally, then rhythm collapses system-wide, and finally the spatial lattice disintegrates into a disordered fluid. The experiments, a classical analog to quantum spacetime crystals, reveal that spatial and temporal orders can melt independently due to two distinct mechanisms, offering new ways to study spatiotemporal symmetry-breaking. Findings published in PNAS (2026).